>Should get paid? Or should clean it up?

The entity who caused the pollution should be responsible for paying to clean it up. For logistical purposes it might make sense to tax at the point of production/sale rather than actual emission, eg. taxes at gas stations rather than some sort of monitoring system on every car.

> The problem is this is energy and resources that could be spent on actually solving the problem at its source instead of finding ways to maintain the status quo.

If the alternatives are actually cheaper, the market will naturally work itself out, because polluters would be incentivized to switch. Nobody uses plastic utensils in place of reusable ones, not because the government banned them, but because everyone knows the latter are so much cheaper.