Does anyone else sense that we have a major problem with people not keeping their units straight?    The planners and designers doing 'sustainable design' and 'sustainable development' are all measuring their success in terms of the %'s but not making any of the things compared correspond to physical sustainability of the systems they work on.  They measure %'s of 'improvement' to indicate their own level of effort as a 'unit' of design quality, but ignore the quantities involved and whether those increase or decrease.   They measure sustainability as % rate of profitability for 'sustainable design', which again makes the same error.   It overlooks that new development is an addition to what exists not a substitution, and that maintaining profitability is to stabalize the exponential expansion of resource uses, stabalizing the rate of increase not the resources.   

Because so many people are not doing the math correctly a lot of policy is written to 'solve our problem' of depleating resources by making it much worse, using them up faster to stabalize our rate of increased use, rather than actually conserving the resource.    I have been trying to explain that using up relatively expensive new resources as fast as we can doesn't solve the problem of having done that with the cheap resources that are now gone.   The units seem to get in the way.

Phil