Why to have a carbon tax

Why?  Because it's positively Pigovian,.

Paying for it

The basic thesis is - everyone in society pays for the cost of profigacy and licentiousness by a few.  And in this case, the few are the big fossil fuel consumers, which we citizens of the U.S. qualify as.

The other thing is, in addition to some of the monies supporting expansion of clean and reliable nuclear power, the revenues from a carbon tax could actually help lower the budget deficit.

Is there a problem with that?  Apparently not much, according to one analysis:

"Perhaps because a carbon tax makes so much sense—researchers at M.I.T. recently described it as a possible “win-win-win” response to several of the country’s most pressing problems—economists on both ends of the political spectrum have championed it. Liberals like Robert Frank, of Cornell, and Paul Krugman, of Princeton, support the idea, as do conservatives like Gary Becker, at the University of Chicago, and Greg Mankiw, of Harvard. (Mankiw, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and as an adviser to Mitt Romney, is the founding member of what he calls the Pigou Club.) A few weeks ago, more than a hundred major corporations, including Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever, issued a joint statement calling on lawmakers around the globe to impose a “clear, transparent and unambiguous price on carbon emissions,” which, while not an explicit endorsement of a carbon tax, certainly comes close."

It's an idea whose time IS coming, and WILL come.  The sooner, the better, methinks.