A carbon tax will increase my pollution. I will burn wood and paper products.
AND, as the cost to fuel my pickup truck goes up, I will no longer be able to own a second - gas sipping commuter - vehicle. The extra insurance and maintainance costs will go towards my practical vehicle not a useless fart can that can barely move driver and passengers.
Which is as it should be. Let's do the numbers, shall we?
Let's say you own a medium-size pickup truck, say 22 miles per gallon. You decide that, in order to be a nice, environmentally-concerned bleeding heart, you're going to buy an electric BMW i3 and drive it everywhere you don't actually need the hauling capacity of the truck.
The Beemer gets an effective mpg of 124. For ease of calculation, let's say it's 100 mpg more fuel-economical than the truck.
Now, let's set the price of gas at $US 3.00/gal. That means driving 12,000 miles per year (about average) in the pickup costs $US 1636.
Let's say you drive 8000 miles per year in the BMW, and 4000 in yer twuck. Now your total equivalent fuel cost is $US 545 for your twuck, and $US 194 for the BMW, total of &US 739.
Yay, you! You're saving nine hundred bucks a year.
A BMW i3 costs 42K.
Soooo. . . assuming that price is a reasonable reflection of the resources (including pollution) that go into manufacturing the vehicle (which is basic economics), let's knock off profit and snob value and say the BMW causes $US 30K worth of terrible environmental effects, and saves you $US 900 per year in terrible environmental effects.
That means you'd only have to drive the BMW for 33 years for your fuel efficiency to offset the pollution and resource cost of producing it.
Probably more environmentally friendly just to dwive the twuck.