That's a valid concern and is the reason to scale the tax in over a many year period. That tax revenue doesn't have to be consumed by a swelling government, but part of it could be directly distributed as a dividend to each member of the society on an equal per-capita basis or biased towards lower income members of the society.

The counterfactual challenge is brutal, too: if we don’t do anything, the impact on food production will be far worse but if we don’t let it happen first we’re going to be plagued with people saying it wouldn’t have been so bad.