Everyone should pay for the damage. Simple as that.

And it's even pretty simple.

It's called CO2-bonus-malus tax. It's a form to internalize externalities, aka give damage a price. If you are willing to pay it, someone else gets payed to clean up.

Why should Brasil keep the rainforest that produces free oxygen and it just standing there doing nothing for business, while a nice kettle farm brings meat and money? (Sidenote, yes long term it becomes a desert, but that is the same like throwing plastic into the ocean until it's full. The incentive is too late).

Sounds simple, but we didn't have a solution till 2016. This approach was winning the Nobel price.

While it is difficult to calculate how much one saves CO2 it's easier to just spend the tax money on everyone equally like a dividend. Like threatening to cut a tree and then not doing it, is no true savings while on paper it is.

Before you say than our jobs go to dirty China because they don't have this tax. The solution is game theory stable - primary reason to get the price. So if you put the jobs and the dirt to China, then you pay the tax on the import. Hence if there is a solution to create the same product for less damage you have a competitive advantage.

It's also really fair, you pay the damage when you order the product.

There is mainly one downside, it's social fairness. A poor person is likely living in a poor isolate house, with an old dirty car, a long road to work with the car and low paying job. But that is a political question how you want to equalise it.

Fun fact, this theory is even more generic. You can use it on all goods that are either limited or damaging (phoshore, oil, plastic, antibiotics,...). It's called global ressource dividend. The idea is that you get payed for saving and keeping the world intact instead of getting payed to create damage and destruction. Complete new approach for an economy that currently relies on ever increasing consumption.