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Killing Cobras Won’t Solve Climate Change
The economic principle behind carbon credits failed in 1865.
For the last few decades there’s been a push for energy efficiency. Energy efficiency was meant to be a stopgap, a way for the world to slow down climate change until replacements for fossil fuels reached parity. Yet for all the efficiency we’ve enjoyed in cars, computers, and even energy production, our emissions have grown and climate change is getting worse.
What happened? And how do we stop it from continuing?
In the context of climate change, it doesn’t matter how efficient we can ever make our fossil fuel use. We’re still using fossil fuels. We’re still emitting.
Out of frustration, this has led to even stronger calls for efficiency, so much so that we can’t help repeating this mantra even for energy use from renewable sources.
To see why energy efficiency failed, let’s take a journey back in time.
Imagine you’re a character in Jules Verne’s book “Around the World in Eighty Days”. You find yourself in India during British rule. That’s when you learn Delhi has a cobra problem.
THE COBRA EFFECT
India in the 1880’s was a dangerous place. Over 20,000 people a year perished from venomous snake bites, chief among them the King Cobra.
What would you do in this situation? How do you incentivize a reduction in snake bites?
The British went after the snakes. In an attempt to control the viper population, British administrators set a bounty of $1 for every dead snake submitted to the government. The public responded and the government paid for 254 thousand snakes in 1881 alone.
But the deaths from snake bite didn’t diminish and, in many regions, the numbers even increased. Administrators soon learned what went wrong. The bounty for cobras provided such a market incentive that entepreneurs began farming cobras. The dead snakes were never wild. Even worse, when administrators cracked down on cobra farming, the entrepreneurs simply released their product into the wild rather than get caught with them, compounding the original problem and ultimately leading to more snake bite deaths.
