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.

"Sustainable development" is a term coined in the 1980s to describe a model of economic and social development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

"I think the sustainable development model is founded in bad faith," Foster says in an interview. "It's about persuading ourselves that we are addressing the problem while knowing tacitly all along that we are not. It's about providing ourselves with a hook to let ourselves off."

This is a fairly serious accusation to make about a concept that has been endorsed at the highest international level as the best way of keeping the planet in a reasonable state for our descendants.

But "The Sustainability Mirage" argues persuasively that our reliance on uncertain scientific predictions about how complex ecological systems will change in the long term gives leaders an excuse to base environmental policies like cutting greenhouse emissions on vague, movable targets.

This allows them to put the needs of the present first and delay taking decisive action indefinitely.

"All this amounts to the anatomy of a mirage effect - a deluding goal which always and necessarily recedes as we strive towards it," Foster writes in his timely book.

Take, for example, last week's controversy about a British government proposal to reduce the need for cuts in domestic carbon emissions by investing more in clean energy projects in developing countries.

In theory, this should not lead to extra carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere globally. But according to the BBC, reports suggest that some projects in places like China and India that are used to offset carbon emissions elsewhere would have gone ahead anyway, so they actually don't generate CO2 savings.

"You find the figures that suit what you want to do. So if we want to ease the pressure on us a bit, we let ourselves take these carbon credits from abroad and everybody knows that the calculations around that sort of stuff is terribly, terribly squishy," Foster says.

On a personal level too, we tend to talk ourselves into taking the easier route. In the book, Foster tells his own cautionary tale of how he agonised over whether to ditch a daily 26-mile bike ride and train journey in favour of buying a second family car that would help him cope with a growing workload.

In the end, he decided that driving to the office was justified by the potential ecological benefits of his new project to create an environmental education centre. Ironically, it never came to pass.

So what is Foster's answer to the self-deception of sustainable development?

ACT NOW

The environmental philosopher says we should focus on the needs of the planet today, rather than long-term predictions about climate change. And that means taking the difficult decision to ration our carbon emissions as individuals, as well as organisations and governments.

Sounds simple. But Foster argues that creating the political will for greener living and comprehensive carbon budgeting in rich countries will require a more honest approach than we've used to date.

The book outlines a philosophy in which we focus on defending what is natural in our lives - a concept he calls "deep sustainability".

"It collects momentum by being articulated in a different framework in which you say...too much of life falls apart, there's not enough sense of a living purpose in life if we are consciously or semi-consciously throwing away the future with pretty well everything we do," Foster explains.

In practical terms he proposes that unions, non governmental organisations, churches and other civil society groups should launch a huge popular campaign for rationing our personal emissions, which could perhaps be built around showings of Al Gore's climate crisis documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Before all this starts sounding a little too "woolly hatted", Foster argues that capitalism can be part of the solution providing it functions the way it's supposed to - "which is to encourage entrepreneurial creativity" to meet the demands of the market.

But when it comes to international climate negotiations, he doesn't expect much progress until one of the major industrial economies commits to rationing carbon emissions.

Rich countries have effectively been signalling that the Western way of life is not negotiable, says Foster. "Well, it's got to become negotiable."

The weakness of "The Sustainability Mirage" is that it doesn't put enough flesh on the bones of the actions needed to get rich consumers to recognise their environmental responsibility to the present rather than the far-distant future.

Foster proposes tactics like citizens' juries, participatory theatre and "education for sustainability" - all nice ideas. But can they really persuade people to stop jumping on low-cost airlines and filling their homes with cheap furniture and clothes from China?

And who's to say that personal carbon budgeting wouldn't descend into the same game of smoke and mirrors as international carbon trading?

Foster admits his proposed alternative to our self-serving reliance on "sustainable development" requires more work. Yet he justifies what seems to be a rather hastily concocted prescription by stressing the urgent need to diagnose the causes of our sustainable development malaise.

"We haven't got time to get it wrong," he argues. "If we look back in 50 years and say, whoops, that was the wrong model, we don't have a second chance."

The Sustainability Mirage: Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change is published by Earthscan and can be ordered online.

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