Sustainable development thinking got environmental issues onto the agenda but it may now be stopping us from taking serious action on climate change and other crucial planetary issues, argues John Foster, a freelance writer and teacher and honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK in his new book "The Sustainability Mirage: Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change."

Sustainable development's attempted deal between present and future will always collapse under the pressure of 'now' because the needs of the present always win out, he says. Inevitably, this means movable targets and action that will always fall short of what we need. Ultimately, sustainable development is the pursuit of a mirage, the politics of never getting there.

To escape the illusion, he states that society must break through to a new way of understanding sustainability by focusing on the deep needs of the present, not slippery obligations to the future. That means rising to the carbon challenge now, not trying to micro-manage the longer-term, and looking to science for orders of magnitude and direction, not a game-plan.

His book outlines alternative thinking on energy usage, governance, education and the role of enterprise in the cultural aspects of the war on climate change.

"This thoughtful and original study throws important critical light on the dominant orthodoxies about sustainable development, and suggests a radically new direction. Foster argues compellingly that present approaches embody floating standards and bad faith, trapping societies into inaction. I suspect this is a seminal piece of work," says Professor Robin Grove-White, former Chair of Greenpeace UK.

Obviously there is the same disconnect all these plans by environmental activists have; namely in insisting that business is evil and only governments can promote responsible environmental policy but then insisting that the short-term dynamics of capitalism will lead to solutions that don't involve the Nihilism of condemning all new people and especially developing countries to never having any energy.

Science and capitalism both work best unfettered by politics, that much has been obvious for a century, but stating the obvious won't sell a lot of books.