Responsible Consumption and Production

SDG 12 in Watts and Wealth shows up in the production-side discipline the game forces on every player. Output is not free — it carries a pollution debit and an opportunity cost against more efficient builds.

Primary mechanics

Every facility has an explicit energy-output value and a pollution-per-turn cost. The per-seat energy ledger is visible to all players. When a player runs an energy deficit (more demand than facility output), the deficit converts into pollution at a fixed conversion rate, modelling the externality of unmet demand met through dirty backup.

Decommissioning retires a facility for a 50% build-cost refund. This makes responsible retirement of carbon-heavy infrastructure economically rational rather than a sunk-cost trap — a deliberate departure from real-world lock-in dynamics, modelling the policy lever of accelerated retirement.

Card-level grounding

• Plastic_Ban_Enacted is an era-4 Policy card that subtracts ten from the global pollution stock — a one-shot regulatory drawdown that models the production-side mechanism of SDG 12.4.
• Green_Bills_Enact is an era-4 Policy card that swings ten pollution either way depending on whether the table is majority-renewable or majority-fossil — a conditional production-side incentive.
• Energy_Subsidy is intentionally morally ambiguous — an era-1 Policy that drops all build costs by two tokens regardless of source, modelling SDG 12.c on fossil-fuel subsidy reform (the card creates the subsidy distortion that the SDG asks the world to remove).
• Carbon_Capture_System is an era-2 Policy card that reduces one pollution per facility, modelling end-of-pipe production-side abatement.
• Steam_Turbine_Upgrade is an era-1 Policy card that adds one energy output to every fossil-fuel facility — efficiency on the production side, but only on fossil generation.
• Dirty_Industry_Surge is a Policy card that gives the player five tokens per fossil facility while pumping ten pollution into the global stock; Logistics_Disruption is an Event that raises the next build’s cost by five tokens. Both surface what happens when production externalities are not internalized.

SDG 12 sub-targets in mechanics

• 12.2 (sustainable management of natural resources): facility-cost structure encodes the resource intensity of each generation type.
• 12.4 (chemicals and waste): Plastic_Ban_Enacted’s flat pollution drawdown + the persistent pollution counter encode the waste-stream consequence.
• 12.c (fossil fuel subsidy reform): Energy_Subsidy is the in-game distortion the SDG asks to be reversed.