when is green not green?

There are tools for measuring your personal carbon footprint, tools for determining the embodied energy in construction materials, tools for designing low-carbon buildings, and tools for getting developments accredited for various measures of sustainability. The choice is growing every month, and therein lies a challenge: how to standardise what we mean by "sustainable". As international agreements evolve through processes such as the current negotiations around the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol, we will be forced to converge on an agreed standard - at least as it pertains to carbon emissions. (Though George Bush seems set on developing his own carbon market in parallel, reminding me of the old Betamax vs. VHS battle for ascendancy in video technology, or the current Blu-ray vs HD DVD war.) In the meantime, we will be faced with a growing number of disputes over developments like this one in Maine, USA.