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FPTP minority governments are generally less stable than proportional representation minority governments because: 1. There is a greater swing in seat representation for leading parties given a swing in popular opinion. As a result, there is a greater incentive for leading parties to go to elections to try to get a majority government. For example, if the conservative government has a minority government with 35% of the popular vote in FPTP and their popular support swings to 40%, well now they have an incentive to have an election because 40% is majority territory for FPTP systems. 2. FPTP parties are used to this winner take all mentality so aren't used to negotiating with other parties. This creates a culture of hostility and lack of cooperation which you would not get if parties are used to a proportional representation system.

Other than the title, where is the 'technical jargon'? It's not a complicated concept. A poor person benefits from $1. A richer person benefits from $1. The poor person probably benefits more from $1 than the rich person. How many more times does the poor person value that $1 if the rich person is only 25% richer than the poor person?

I'm not sure where the revenue would go. Do you keep it in the country that collected the tax? Do you use it to redistribute wealth to poor countries? Do you use it to fund research and development? Do you use it to help countries adapt to climate change? Do you use it to spend on geoengineering projects such as adding aerosols to the atmosphere or removing excess CO2 from the environment? There would still be a lot up for negotiation. However, I will point out that if you let individual countries collect their revenues and keep it within their own countries then there is an incentive for countries to find loopholes in the international agreements and cheat by subsidizing companies or sectors of the economy that emit lots of CO2 with the tax revenue collected from the CO2 tax. For example, China may have a CO2 tax... but happen to also have a subsidy for power companies, which conveniently happens to primarily affect coal plants, and coincidentally equally offsets the CO2 emission tax these coal plants would be expected to pay.

All countries suffer from the free-rider problem. The fact that CO2 emissions have global impacts, yet we have ~200 countries all acting in their own national best interest means that countries will have an incentive to cheat international agreements since the impact of their own emissions are not fully internalized within their own country. If there were an easy solution to the free rider problem, it wouldn't be such a problem. I can't give a solution that will solve everything, but I can point out things that will help: 1. Acknowledge the free-rider problem and its magnitude. This is something that the vast majority of politicians in all countries are not doing. The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging its existence. 2. Slowly narrow the space of possible negotiated solutions to climate change. The set of solutions is infinitely dimensional, and having each country negotiate an arbitrary target decreases the chances of obtaining a solution. It is known that the less parameters there are to argue over, the higher the chance of obtaining a negotiated solution. Not to mention that you don't want all your gains that could be made from mitigation policy to be eaten up by endless negotiations and rent seeking. This means that the way these climate change negotiations are approached needs to be completely rethought. Rather than each country pledging arbitrary targets, we should first try to get agreements on basic axioms or statements that will reduce the space of solutions. For example, getting countries to agree on a range of values of ECS, getting countries to agree on acceptable levels of risk aversion, agree to an acceptable discount rate, etc. 3. The primary mitigation policy needs to be a global pigouvian tax with equal rate for everyone, no exceptions. Not only does this result in the largest emission reduction for a given cost to your economy, but it reduces the space of mitigation options to 1 parameter which varies over time, thus it greatly increases the chances of obtaining a global solution. Not to mention, determining the optimal level calculating the social cost of carbon dioxide emissions becomes arguably an empirical question. 4. Take a more tit-for-tat approach. Rather than perform mitigation policy regardless of what other countries do (or worse, do mitigation policy to offset what other countries do), threaten to do 0 mitigation policy if other countries do not also do mitigation policy. This increases the incentive for other countries to perform mitigation policy and come to the negotiating table. Not to mention that given that Canada is a relatively cold country, we can play the game of 'chicken' longer than other countries, so eventually they will cave. 5. Realize that some countries are so irrational that they will never agree to a globally optimal solution. Some countries that Saudi Arabia believe that women shouldn't drive, evolution is a lie, oil is their gift from Allah, gays and apostates should be killed and are more interesting in spreading Wahabbism. Other countries like North Korea are more interested in maintaining power and will view any international agreement as a foreign imperialist threat from the capitalists meant to destroy their national identity. So no matter what there will be non-compliant countries that will try to free-ride or try to get absurd concessions. 6. Be willing to use economic sanctions or even military force on non-compliant countries. At best, it might be possible to get an agreement which contains the world's main economic and military powers (i.e. NATO, Japan, Australia and the BRICS). If you do get this type of agreement, then it might be possible to impose the agreed upon solution on non-compliant countries through threats of economic sanctions and military action. This is a far more realistic solution since now you only need an agreement by ~20 countries rather than ~200 and you get rid of the problem of having to negotiate with irrational actors. I still don't understand your question.

But he looked me in the eyes and made all the correct facial expressions. Surely it is sincere! Not to mention one could argue that he is implying that being Prime Minister is his birthright.

I realized something. Global energy consumption in 2012 was 5.598 x 10^20 joules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption This corresponds to 1.774 x 10^13 watts. The radius of the Earth is 6371 km. This means that on average, global energy consumption is 0.0348 W/m^2. If climate sensitivity is ~2C and the change in radiative forcing is 3.7 W/m^2 for a doubling of CO2, then this suggests that the Earth is nearly 0.02 C warmer purely due to the waste heat from all the fossil fuels, nuclear power, etc. that we produce.

I find it interesting that Trudeau kept bringing up his 3 children when talking about climate change. Isn't population growth one of the reasons fossil fuel emissions are going to increase over the coming decades?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem I don't understand your question.

The liberals, NDP and greens kept claiming that we need a 'national' plan to tackle climate change, or we need a 'North American wide' plan to tackle climate change. But climate change is a global problem, so it needs to be tackled globally and there needs to be a global plan.

So you are saying that we should ignore the free-rider problem with respect to CO2 emissions?

You guys are no fun. :/ Just pick a number.

https://www.google.ca/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=en_atm_co2e_pc&idim=country:CAN:USA:AUS&hl=en&dl=en

Yeah, that's true. So many examples of it in society. "Raising the minimum wage will have 0 effect on employment and only hurts the super rich millionaires!" "Significant CO2 mitigation policy will have no negative economic effects because it will create all these green jobs." etc.

Young people will vote against conservatives, but I don't think that is something unique to Harper or Canada. When the schools and universities constantly spew social justice and environmental alarmist nonsense continually, it's not hard to see why. We need powerpoint debates. Where leaders bring all their facts on powerpoint or something and display their sources on a screen whenever they make them.

Basically Trudeau is denying the existence of any tradeoff between the environment and the economy. The other parties do it too. Harper deludes himself into thinking that CO2 emission taxes have zero effect on emissions. May and Mulcair delude themselves into thinking that stopping fossil fuel exports 'keeps jobs in Canada', etc. The ideologies of the parties are so simplistic that they cannot deal with tradeoffs, so they try to pretend the existence of these tradeoffs away.

I sort of get the point but... Really? Some random person phoning you and asking about voting intentions? Try going to one of our universities and its wonderful respect for freedom of speech and differing opinions...

Nice hair.

May did better than here: They are biased hipsters. A lot of people will think the person that preached to their choir won, regardless of performance. Ignore them.

I hate them all but I would have to agree with this ranking. So Mulcair wants a $15 minimum wage and Trudeau is against raising the retirement age despite increasing life expectancy?

Actually, on second thought it is higher than 3.5 cents per liter since you also need to transport and extract the fuel, which emits CO2 in the process. Not to mention CH4 is also emitted in the process, which is the second most relevant human emitted GHG. According to here: http://www.oilsandstoday.ca/topics/ghgemissions/Pages/default.aspx Once you take these other sources of emissions into account, an average barrel of oil emits an equivalent of 500 kg of CO2. A barrel of oil is 159 L. And it takes about 2 barrels of oil to make 1 barrel of gasoline. So the effective tax rate would be ~9.4 cents per litre.

To be fair, there are other reasons for a tax, such as the external health affects due to pollution. The 3.5 cents would be what is justified based on climate change.

Let's see... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline gasoline has a density of ~0.755 kg/L 1 kg of fuel gives 3.09 kg of CO2 So a $15 per ton of CO2 tax would correspond to a tax of 3.5 cents per litre

If people emit a ton of CO2 you charge them $X. There are already carbon taxes in BC, most European countries, Australia until Tony Abbot got in, etc.

I don't understand the meaning of your question. What do you mean by % rate? Example: http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums/topic/23149-americans-believe-climate-change-is-real-and-a-real-problem/?p=931124

It's quite long though. From what I can tell, the Ramsey equation is fairly well accepted in economic literature. Although there are some exceptions (such as the Stern report, which uses a 0.1% discount rate). Here is an even longer discussion paper by Arrow, Nordhaus, Tol, Weitzman and some other economics on the discount rate. http://rff.org/RFF/Documents/RFF-DP-12-53.pdf It discusses ways of empirically measuring the discount rate and μ, as well as various economic bases for the discount rate decreasing over time. I don't suggest anyone in this thread read it though, since it probably isn't worth your time. However, it does mention that the Obama administration uses a 2.5% discount rate for the benefits of mitigation policy and a 3% discount rate for the costs of mitigation policy, which makes absolutely no sense.