Next year will see the launch of probably the most ambitious government plan for tackling household carbon emissions ever attempted: the Green Deal. If it works, it will be a significant step towards bringing UK emissions down to a sustainable level – about a quarter of the country's carbon budget goes on powering homes, and the Green Deal aims to make 14 million of them more energy-efficient by 2020. But it's a big 'if': the entire scheme rests on public buy-in.

If people can't be persuaded that the Green Deal is a good idea, or respond to their newly lowered household bills by cranking up the thermostat, the scheme will lie in tatters. The government, desperate to avoid looking like they are interfering in people's lives, has gambled on 'nudging' people into taking up the deal, despite widespread concerns that it will take a greater effort to get people to clear out their loft and let the home insulation teams in.



2012 could even be the year in which a meaningful conversation about energy use and economic growth takes place. In wealthy nations, economic growth has long stopped delivering meaningful increases in wellbeing for the vast majority of people, and has instead served only to increase the gap between the rich and the poor – and at a significant environmental cost. It is sobering to consider that the biggest dip in UK carbon emissions in the last decade occurred because the global economy almost ground to a halt. Is that really the choice we face: recession or rising seas?

The received wisdom is that no one wants to think about the idea of limiting economic growth during a recession. Yet the Labour leader Ed Miliband included Tim Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth on his summer reading list, the Occupy movements have struck a chord with ordinary people fed up with the destructive greed of the financial sector around the world, and even the David Cameron has acknowledged the need to look beyond cash-flows as a measure of societal success by attempting to measure people's 'wellbeing' as well as their income.

It might seem a distant possibility, but even an acknowledgment of the relationship between carbon emissions and a perpetually growing economy would be worth a thousand lagged lofts. If continuous economic growth on a finite planet can't last forever, the sooner we start thinking about alternatives the better. Kicking off a serious debate about moving towards a 'steady state' economy would be the biggest step towards sustainability we could possibly take.