The human race is playing dice with the natural environment through a crowd of
interventions. As economist William Nordhaus adds, we are ‘injecting into the atmosphere trace
gases like the greenhouse gases or ozone-depleting chemicals, engineering massive land-use changes such as deforestation, depleting multitudes of species in their natural habitats even while creating transgenic ones in the laboratory, and accumulating efficient nuclear weapons to destroy
human civilizations’
(Nordhaus, 2005). It is important to understand the human sources of these global changes and the impending damage they cause the environment and economic systems. I will explain in more detail the greenhouse effect, its impact on the environment and economic systems, and how to determine the socially optimal level of greenhouse gases.