Recent efforts in North America to reduce embodied carbon in concrete are similar to British solutions to eradicate cobras in colonial India. Simple solutions often create bigger problems than the complex ones they were trying to solve.

The story goes that once upon a time in colonial India, British government officials were tasked with reducing the population of the venomous cobra. They chose to institute a bounty on all the poisonous serpents. While some of the population searched under houses and in bushes to find these creatures, others saw a business opportunity and established cobra farms to maintain a more consistent supply of snakes. Upon discovering the entrepreneurial response to this reward system, the colonial government ordered a halt to the snake bounty. With no economic incentive to keep the cobras, the farmers released them—leaving more snakes in India than prior to the start of the British bounty.