[kimixa]

This would only work if every source of atmospheric carbon was equally taxed - otherwise you get incentives to have indirect carbon usage, be it in costs of manufacture, or energy generation through other means.

Otherwise you get BS like scrapping vehicles that took significant amounts of atmospheric carbon to produce, just because they have a slightly better gas mileage. It should only be encouraged if the total over the lifetime of the vehicle is better, but manufacturing costs are often excluded.

Plus this naturally excludes those who can't afford the upfront cost of a new vehicle - even if everything was taxed "correctly" by this logic and so was lower cost in the long run.