Pigovian Pollution Taxes

Sounds like you're describing Pigovian taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

Tax everything the amount it costs to clean up the pollution it causes, from electricity to food. 2 side effects: people will make things that produce less pollution, and people will make cleaning up pollution cheaper

Seems that taxing negative externalities like carbon emissions would be good start

That's what pigouvian taxes and other steep carbon taxes are for

But taxing emmissions and lowering other taxes / adding incentives has the same effect with much fewer drawbacks.

Taxing anything that can pollute (methane, gasoline, diesel) would let The Hand sort it out

I'm going to beat this drum again. When you have a product with negative externalities, like plastic packaging or fossil fuels, price those into the product through a tax. Then, for bonus points, take that tax revenue and put it towards incentivizing greener solutions. The market will then solve your problem remarkably quickly and efficiently. Markets are fantastic, but they don't account for externalities so we need to add that in through regulation to keep a level playing field.

Externality taxes would solve many of today's pressing problems, implemented such that the externality tax is equal to the cost to "undo" whatever externality is imposed (and assuming the government actually spends the money to do so). I.e. we should recognize that we shouldn't outlaw useful and fundamentally positive things that emit CO2 like driving a car, but rather tax the pollution according to the cost to recapture that carbon from the shared environment.

Instead of banning things you don't like, pass a carbon tax then to account for externalities. As a bonus, it could be revenue neutral so that your average person actually ends up ahead (while frequent fliers or polluting industries end up paying more).

Well, you should try to establish the societal cost of the negative externality and then tax at that level. The idea isn't to destroy the thing but to make it's price reflect its actual costEdit: "then cost" => "then tax"