The Cobra Effect

The "cobra effect" is the term used for when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse. This unintended consequence is often is used to describe environmental, economic and political solutions that work in reverse.

The term "cobra effect" originated when there was still British rule in India. The British government wanted to reduce the number of dangerous, venomous cobra snakes in Delhi. They offered a bounty for every dead cobra. So, people were killing them and collecting the bounty. At first, the idea worked. But some enterprising people began to breed cobras to collect more bounties. The government became aware of this abuse and ended the reward program. The cobra breeders had no use for the snakes and released their stock (though it's not clear why people didn't just kill them while they had them in captivity) and as a result, the wild cobra population further increased.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried an incentive scheme in 2005 in an effort to greenhouse gases. If a company disposed of polluting gases it would be rewarded with carbon credits that could be converted into cash. The price for the credits was based on how much damage the pollutant was to the environment. The highest credit price went to HFC-23, a byproduct of a common coolant. As with the cobras, companies began to produce more and more of this coolant so that they could destroy more of the HFC-23 byproduct waste gas and get additional credits

This RadioLab program gives many other examples.