The political problem is the hard part. People hear tax carbon and think "finally, those big SUVs and trucks I hate will be taxed!" and don't think "my annual international travel will become unaffordable" but that is more likely the outcome if you tax all carbon equally. The reality is people want to tax other peoples carbon and that's more like class/urban vs rural warfare than anything to do with the environment.
For me the pragmatic approach is to assume that the third world isn't going to become carbon neutral anytime soon so we are better off preparing for the inevitability of climate change rather than trying to prevent it. Sadly things like large scale geoengineering projects, genetic modification of local flora to support the new climate and other pragmatic measures aren't palatable to the crowd most worried about climate change.
Isn't it a false dichotomy? To say that we have to prepare rather than prevent? I don't think there's a fixed budget for action here -- while you can say that to some degree, resources uses for prevention would take away from preparing, and vice versa, it's far from a 100% tradeoff. If we completely stopped doing anything to prevent climate change, most of that saved effort would not therefore go into preparing for the effects, it would just be spent on other things.
And international travel becoming more expensive is probably true. To the degree that international travel is emissions-heavy, it needs to slow down and stop. But if you change the markets, other things may change. We may shift more to slower style travel like energy-efficient airship cruises powered by hydrogen, or invest heavily into ethanol to the point where airline travel becomes less expensive again. And maybe I'm wrong, and it will never again be as cheap as it was in the era of fossil fuels. But we have to get to carbon neutral -- if that comes earlier because we invent efficient carbon capture, great, but I really think that ending our use of fossil fuels is going to be vital.
And maybe I'm weird, but I am perfectly happy with my own carbon use being taxed to solve this problem. I really don't want it to be a class warfare issue -- we absolutely should do what we can to make it easier on people who will be hit the hardest, those with low income who have jobs that require a lot of car travel, for example.
For me the pragmatic approach is to assume that the third world isn't going to become carbon neutral anytime soon so we are better off preparing for the inevitability of climate change rather than trying to prevent it. Sadly things like large scale geoengineering projects, genetic modification of local flora to support the new climate and other pragmatic measures aren't palatable to the crowd most worried about climate change.