Sustainable Evolution in an Ever-Changing Environment: General Characterization

A complex interplay between the academic issue about generalization of the thermodynamics and the practical matter about setting standards for a sustainable evolution of both tailored devices and natural systems is considered. It is established that the measure for a sustainable evolution in an ever-changing environment appears as a Boltzmann-Gibbs weight. At the same time, this measure performs as a local thermodynamical potential which, at the expense of being released from the condition of entropy maximization, serves as grounds for a fundamental development of the idea of banning perpetuum mobile. It is proven that the best efficiency of each engine that operates reversibly never exceeds the efficiency of corresponding Carnot heat engine where the engine is free from necessity of a physical coupling to two heat reservoirs.