California aims to ban recycling symbols on things that aren’t recyclable

There are no non-enumerable sets of individuals. Presumably you meant "everyone is affected by carbon output". That may even be true. But not everyone is affected equally. Some of the effects may even be beneficial for certain individuals, e.g. a warming climate means more productive farmland in far-northern latitudes. Those living on the coasts (or on islands) are more affected by rising sea levels than those living on higher ground well away from the ocean. Some of that is by choice (you knew sea levels were rising when you bought coastal land) and some is not. All of this needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis before proper compensation can be determined.

> So who cares about compensation?

Presumably the people who are most affected by human-created climate change, and thus would qualify for the most compensation.

> The point of taxing carbon is simply to get less carbon. Full stop.

This thread is about carbon emissions as a negative externality, and properly pricing that externality. When one person's actions have a negative side effect on someone else, that should be handled through the courts in a process which ends with the victim being made whole. Taxes don't accomplish that. Even if we assume the tax is correctly calculated to precisely equal the damage to the victim, the tax money doesn't go to the victim; it just ends up in the government's general fund.

If the goal is simply to use taxes as a blunt instrument to implement the government's social policies ("to get less carbon") without regard for externalities then it might "work" in a sense. All else being equal you do generally get less of things that are taxed—though tax proponents tend to downplay this when it comes to taxes on productivity, i.e. income taxes. On the other hand, carbon taxes give the government an incentive to maintain carbon emissions as an ongoing revenue stream, so it could have the opposite effect over time. (Any proposal with the intended or expected effect of reducing carbon emissions would need to somehow find a way to replace that part of the tax revenue.)

Gasification is a nice intermediate step if you need to mix it with syngas or natural gas to augment supplies, but if you really just are going to convert to electricity or heat eventually you may as well just do it in one centralized step.

Either way the plastic product is just one stop on the path from hydrocarbon to energy and CO2+H2O, but I do think centralized incineration is more practical (especially since it's already done all over the place) with little real downside.

Just assume as a rough estimate that the gas you'd get from gasification is displacing natural gas production. If you just burn the plastic (and other trash) in a way that prevents serious pollution from getting into the air it's bound to be more efficient to do that and then just burn less natural gas -- versus trying to turn what is essentially already fuel into natural gas substitute.

The rest are regional and don't help much from everything I've seen about the topic.

I want glass, paper, and cardboard packaging to make a comeback. We shouldn't be using space age high performance single use materials for making sure the SD card is contained in 100x the mass of plastic it is itself made of.

It's insulting, honestly, that they feel it's worth spending their money to make me throw away trash that didn't need to exist.

Where I am you can technically recycle 1, 2, 4, and 5 but 4 (grocery bags) sucks and 5 is nearly prohibitively expensive. So really you can recycle 1 and 2 and feel good about pretending that the 4 and 5 will be recycled. Meanwhile no one teaches the places that do takeout that they can just use different containers that cost the same or less but are recyclable. And no one teaches them that getting "compostable plastic" is trash here and almost everywhere.