Again, I do not agree with this change. Regardless of your environmental satisfaction, it is not rational to stage a protest based on the lack of rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons. Both should be multiplication, not addition.

Environmentalists should never protest unless they are unhappy about something, regardless how easy it is to protest. However, climate change being a global issue that is of concern to environmentalists, and no country being able to solve it unilaterally is going to mean there is a chance of unavoidable environmental protests in the long game.

Glad I'm not the only one that got confused by this. I could've sworn I saw Environmentalists getting more and more antsy as I got the Environment trending upwards. About the time I finally solved the respiratory issues, I got word that the Environmentalists were especially unsettled lately. I even started wondering if I had it backwards, like maybe the Environment actually represents pollution and you want it to go down like Crime and Unemployment lol.

I prefer an ‘iron fist in velvet glove’ approach … use environmentally friendly policy & taxation to reduce CO2 without adversely affecting economic growth … also use tear gas/ water cannon or rapid action force to dampen the threat of excessive environmentalist action

One of the very counter-intuitive things about politics is that doing a lot very visibly to fix a problem actually makes people more aware of the problem. It sounds mad, but if your political party is always giving speeches about how they are solving the terrible rate of crime, then you just reinforce the perception in the population that crime is out of control! Sometimes politicians really cannot win.

The game does model this to some extent :D.

There is also another real-world counter-intuitive phenomena, which is that politicians that pledge to solve an issue should never actually solve it. If you solve it, nobody is going to vote for the party who made that problem their main rallying call. If you pledge to cut immigration, and then do it, then all of the people who hated immigration are now satisfied, and very quickly stop giving you credit for it.

This is why we model complacency in the game, and you can see it on the screen showing all the voter group happiness. This also means that you can make a group TOO happy, in strategic terms.

To put it in brutal terms: Solve Climate change, and soon you will get no credit for it, but environmentalists will move on to being unhappy about noise pollution, or water pollution.

BTW this is in no way a dig at environmentalists! Every political group behaves the same way in the game, and in real life. Activists will stay activists (and angry) long after their demands are met. Its human nature :D.

Spot on Cliff.. this is so true... hence in our system, even strong leaders end up using all or most of their accrued goodwill within just couple of terms / within a decade ... example Thatcher & Blair.