I grabbed some figures and intend to add overrides now to account for the vastly different impact…
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Wow, Australia surely uses quite alot.
I’d say that you should also take in acount all the jobs provided in coal-fired power plants and all the truck and train drivers that coal requires, not just mining.
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The stats I used included coal fired power plant jobs, but not truck and train drivers. I guess we only really need to measure jobs to the extent to which they are not replaced. So if fewer truck drivers carrying coal get replaced by oil tanker drivers, then there is no impact, so its all pretty approximate.
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Then I think that numbers from both South Korea and Japan need to be checked again, since they use quite a lot of coal:
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They may consume a lot, but not mine it. From my rough, quick research it seems like both countries import a lot. Maybe jobs in power plants are just way lower than jobs where you actually mine the coal.
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I’m not sure, but are there currently any policies in game for subsidizing other fossil fuels besides Oil? Such as Coal or Natural Gas. Having more granular control might be nice for the player, though I’m not entirely sure of their impact in game.
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We only have one policy for this, but as I recall its actually called ‘Fossil fuel subsidies’, if its called Oil subsidies, maybe it needs renaming? I don’t think there is enough difference in terms of political and economic impact on splitting such subsidies by hydrocarbon type.
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The policy’s exact name is “Oil drilling subsidies”
I would support renaming this policy to “Fossil fuel subsidies” to broaden it’s meaning.
There is probably room for a dilemma regarding natural gas. On the one hand, it’s much cleaner burning and produces less CO2 emission per unit energy than other fossil fuels, therefore subsidizing it could be seen as an environmental move. On the other hand, it’s a fossil fuel.
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Yes it makes sense to rename it in that case. Maybe its fair to say that the slider represents the overall subsidy mix to some extent. So a high value would be funneling subsidies to coal, and then lower might suggest a shift to gas, as well as lower subsidies in general.
I’m wary of introducing additional complexity unless its clear there is a deficiency in the simulation.
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I can see that this is a question of how deep do we want to go down this rabbit hole when there are so many other topics in this game. Still, I personally think this side of the game could use more depth, as I do tire of having to implement every environmental policy to full or else burn. Natural gas is seen by many as significantly different from oil and coal by many. Oil had a run of distancing itself from coal, but many see it as lumped in with coal by now.
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I imagine that funding every fossil fuel beyond just Oil would have a greater impact on every value. Unless you aggregated all hydrocarbon data under “Oil Drilling Subsidies”, then I guess that it would be a simple matter of renaming it. If you think that this technical difference increases the deficiency of your simulation.