If an economics professor had his way, the ”sweater police” might soon be knocking at your door as part of a campaign to combat climate change.

Joergen Randers, an environmental expert at the Norwegian School of Management, has puzzled for years over the question: what’s the easiest way to slow global warming?

After weighing ideas like phasing out coal-fired power plants, raising prices for energy or public subsidies for wind or solar power, he has finally come up with his answer: force people to wear sweaters indoors in cool climates. Then they will use less coal, oil or gas for heating.

If it was compulsory to wear a sweater, or an additional sweater if you already have one on, it would be pretty unbearable to have the thermostat at the current levels, he told me.

So maybe we should all get knitting or start farming sheep? The New Zealand and Australian wool industries would love his idea.

Even Randers admits its a sort of joke but reckons that, from a purely economic point of view, it would be the most effective way of getting tens of millions of people to save energy. Many governments have been telling people for years to turn down the heating but it hasnt worked, he says.

“No political party in a democracy would ever dare to make this proposal to make people wear sweaters because then you would have to have sweater police to enforce it. They would have to have powers to enter anyones home for spot checks. And to many that might sound like Big Brother surveillance or the Spanish Inquisition.

Do you agree? Should we embrace Randers’ ideas or just say “baah”?