Unintended Consequences

The Amazon Soy Moratorium spared 18,000 square kilometers of forest yet accelerated soy-driven clearing across the neighboring Cerrado. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In July 2006, after a Greenpeace campaign traced soy from newly cleared Amazon land to European supply chains, the major grain traders announced they would stop buying soy grown on any Amazon land deforested after July 24 of that year. .....

The Cactoblastis moth cleared 24 million hectares of Australian prickly pear but now threatens Caribbean and Florida cacti. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1926 the Commonwealth Prickly Pear Board released three thousand Cactoblastis cactorum eggs at Chinchilla station in Queensland. The moth larvae were meant to devour the pads of Opuntia stricta and Opuntia inermis that had already covered roughly...

Kenya's 2018 charcoal ban drove a 133 percent surge in imports from Uganda within six months. Segment 1 — The Cold Open On 24 February 2018 the Kenyan government announced a moratorium on logging and charcoal production in public and community forests. Domestic charcoal prices rose 36 percent almost immediately, and charcoal imports from Uganda increased 133 percent in the first six months. The po...

Twenty-three million metric tons of road salt spread each winter now salinize forty-four percent of northeastern lakes. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1938 New Hampshire highway crews first tried spreading sodium chloride on state roads to keep them clear through winter. The chloride ions never degrade, and a 2017 analysis of 371 North American lakes found that 44 percent of those sampled in the Mid...

GI Bill mortgages raised homeownership from 44 to 62 percent, steering veterans into car-only suburbs. Segment 1 — The Cold Open The 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act offered returning veterans low-interest, no-down-payment home loans that banks and builders directed toward new single-family tracts built beyond existing rail lines. ... Sources: unvarnishedhistory.org · aeaweb.org · courses.lumenl...

One hundred starlings released in 1890 now number roughly 150 million and cause eight hundred million dollars in annual crop damage. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1890 Eugene Schieffelin and the American Acclimatization Society released one hundred European starlings into Central Park. The society’s stated goal was to enrich North American wildlife with familiar and useful Old World species. ... So...

Mexico City's 1989 Hoy No Circula program prompted 85,000 annual used-vehicle imports, shifting the fleet toward dirtier cars. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1989 Mexico City launched Hoy No Circula, banning most drivers from using their cars one weekday each week according to the last digit of the license plate. The rule aimed to cut vehicle emissions on high-smog days. ... Sources: uta.pressbooks....

Red-light cameras cut right-angle crashes 24.6 percent yet raised rear-end crashes 14.9 percent across 132 intersections. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 2005 the Federal Highway Administration examined 132 camera-equipped intersections in seven U.S. jurisdictions and recorded a 24.6 percent drop in right-angle crashes alongside a 14.9 percent rise in rear-end collisions. The same report calculated a...

By 2012 the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program had distributed 4.49 million hectares yet tenancy persisted on reclassified lands. Segment 1 — The Cold Open On June 30, 2021, the Philippine Supreme Court ruled in G.R. No. 226852 that a two-hectare parcel in Barangay Makiling, Calamba, Laguna, owned by Asia United Bank, qualified for exemption from the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program becaus...

The 1986 Oosterschelde barrier cut tidal volume by thirty percent, leaving a four-hundred-million-cubic-meter sediment deficit. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1986 the final Oosterschelde storm-surge barrier and its compartment dams were closed, shrinking the tidal prism that had once moved water in and out of the estuary. Within a few years the channels began to fill with sand that could no longer...

Britain's 1696 window tax led owners to seal thousands of windows, darkening homes and spreading illness. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In the mid-nineteenth century a local physician visited a crowded dwelling where every window that poverty could spare had been bricked up to reduce the tax bill. The house grew so poorly ventilated that a fever originating inside it spread through the town and killed...

Over 500 native species vanished from Lake Victoria after Nile perch were introduced in 1954 to create fisheries. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In August 1954, officials from the Uganda Game and Fisheries Department quietly transferred Nile perch from Lake Albert into Lake Victoria despite objections from East African Fisheries Research Organization scientists. ... Sources: doi.org · tandfonline.com ·...

The 1968 National Flood Insurance Act produced 25 percent more housing starts in participating communities. Segment 1 — The Cold Open Congress passed the National Flood Insurance Act on August 1, 1968, after Hurricane Betsy in 1965 produced America’s first billion-dollar storm and drove up federal disaster-relief costs. The program offered subsidized coverage that private insurers had refused to w...

Flight envelope protection cut fatal loss-of-control accidents 91 percent yet left pilots slower to recover when automation handed the airplane back. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In June 2009 Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330, lost reliable airspeed data from iced Pitot probes. The autopilot disconnected and the aircraft, already in a high-altitude cruise, entered a stall that the crew did not ar...

After banning four breeds in 1991, UK dog bite hospital admissions rose 81 percent by 2017. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 2018 the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee examined hospital records and found admissions for dog bites had climbed from 4,110 in 2005 to 7,461 in 2017. The 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act had banned four types outright and placed strict controls on any othe...

The 22 trillion won Four Rivers Project’s 16 weirs slowed flows and caused algal blooms across South Korea’s rivers. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In June 2008, President Lee Myung-bak directed his land minister to add weirs and deepen dredging on the four major rivers rather than rely on dike reinforcement alone. The 22 trillion won project that followed created sixteen concrete structures meant to s...

The 1990 Clean Air Act gave 3.5 million extra allowances to scrubber plants, keeping high-sulfur coal units running longer. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1995 the first Phase I units under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments began receiving allowances under Title IV. ... Sources: epa.gov · eia.gov · journals.tulane.edu · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Correction to episode 155: The episode said the Eastland ro...

The lifeboat rules passed after the Titanic sank capsized the Eastland, drowning 844 passengers at a Chicago dock. Segment 1 — The Cold Open On the morning of July 24, 1915, the excursion steamer Eastland lay tied to a wharf in the Chicago River with more than 2,500 Western Electric employees and their families already aboard for a company picnic. ... Sources: gcaptain.com · smithsonianmag.com · d...

In 1972 Inco built a 381-metre stack to clear Sudbury's air, and sent the sulphur elsewhere instead. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1972 the Inco nickel smelter in Sudbury, Ontario, completed a chimney 381 metres tall, the tallest in the Western Hemisphere at the time. The structure was meant to lift sulphur dioxide high enough for the winds to carry it past the city. ... Sources: thesudburystar.com...

Over 80 percent of Israel's wastewater reused for irrigation lowered citrus yields by 20 percent after a decade. Segment 1 — The Cold Open The Volcani Institute compared orchards after ten years of drip irrigation with treated wastewater and found avocado and citrus yields 20 to 30 percent lower than trees watered with freshwater in the same fields. ... Sources: library.mevaker.gov.il · oecd.org ·...

Ban-the-box laws widened the Black-White job callback gap from 7 to 43 percent in New Jersey and New York City. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 2018 the Quarterly Journal of Economics published results from a field experiment that sent roughly 15,000 fictitious job applications in New Jersey and New York City before and after local ban-the-box rules took effect. ... Sources: academic.oup.com · datave...

Diclofenac given to Indian cattle from 1994 cut vulture numbers to one-thousandth and added over 100,000 human deaths yearly. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In 1994, after the patent on the painkiller diclofenac expired, Indian generic manufacturers began selling the drug at low cost for treating cattle. Within a decade the three Gyps vulture species that had once numbered in the tens of millions acros...

India issued 80 million free gas connections since 2016, yet 90 percent of users still burned firewood. Segment 1 — The Cold Open On 1 May 2016 Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, and launched the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, promising free LPG connections to five crore poor households so women would no longer cook over wood and dung fires. By September 2019 the scheme h...

Wolves entering 29 Wisconsin counties cut deer-vehicle collisions by 24 percent each year. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In the winter of 2009, a radio-collared wolf crossed a county road in northern Wisconsin and paused to scent-mark a stretch of pavement that also served as a deer travel corridor. Within two years, local deer began shifting their movement patterns away from that same stretch. ... So...

In 1988, the Philippine law meant to redistribute 4,900 hectares of Hacienda Luisita instead let owners keep control through shares. Segment 1 — The Cold Open In June 1988, Congress passed the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law to transfer large estates to the families who tilled them. On the Cojuangco family’s Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, a stock-distribution plan approved the next year gave farmwo...