Peak Sustainable

I've muttered in times past when I was having more to do with local politics on the ground that the buzzword of the day was "sustainable". I wasn't the only person to notice either. Randall over at XKCD suggested that "sustainable" was unsustainable:

That was a while ago now, about 2012 from the look of his graph. However Google Ngram (which sadly only goes as far as 2008) hints that we were approaching a maximum by then.

Luckily although Google have lost interest in Ngram they do now have Google Trends so we can look at "sustainable" in there. This is its use in news headlines:

As you can see it's been slowly declining in news headlines since they first started sampling in 2004.

So it seems that both Randall and I were wrong and we did indeed reach peak "sustainable" sometime around 2004-2006 and thereafter it's been slowly declining and "sustainable" is sustainable, for now at least.