Last week, Sierra Magazine named the nation’s top 20 “coolest” schools for their efforts to stop global warming and operate sustainably.     The magazine’s September/October cover story spotlights the schools that they believe are making a true impact for the planet, and marks Sierra’s third annual listing of America’s greenest universities and colleges. [...]

This post, by Jerry J. Toman, ScM, ChE examines five policies that are setting our future up for failure. They are: Reliance on the old-time political religion of economic growth (usually defined as by economists as GDP growth); Continue to practice incrementalism above all else, as the dominant means of solving the problems; Embarking willy-nilly into mega-projects that utilize technologies that often are half-baked in terms of knowing what the overall costs, impacts and benefits would be; Ignoring the “carbon balance” aspects of current practices and future remedies; and relying on technologies that involve extensive “mining” of the earth’s solid surface for minerals, as a means to achieve sustainability.