BOOK REVIEW: Why our climate change solutions are a mirage

BOOK REVIEW: Why our climate change solutions are a mirage. John Foster, author of the The Sustainability Mirage and a British academic in his late fifties, recalls his younger years as a green activist. "I remember the days when to stand up on a march in London and talk about this stuff was to be dismissed as a complete freak and a loony - 'woolly hatted lentil-stirrers' was the kind of thing people said about us."

Now, thanks to the growing scientific evidence about global warming, all that has changed. World leaders treat climate change and its consequences as a critically important issue. You'd have thought Foster would be pleased.

But the Lancaster University research fellow is so worried about how the world is gearing up to fight "the coming war on climate change" that he's written a book about what's gone wrong. The clue lies in the title.

For Foster, the widely held belief that "sustainable development" is the answer to the world's environmental woes amounts to little more than an illusion.