ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the salient policy provisions being debated in Congress, and the parallel and related phenomena of carbon markets. It raises useful policy questions that social science can address in a timely fashion, and suggest how concepts of sequestration and offsets might broaden participation in these markets beyond global financial institutions and political institutions of nation-states. From my perspective, the nation's global change policy has been firmly rooted in research and assessment via the US Global Change Research Program, the primary authorization for the involvement of the federal government in climate change. When a committee wanted specific testimony on economic costs and impacts of the bills, they invariably turned to economists who describe them in macroeconomic terms. The point is that neither anthropology nor other social sciences, which can give finely tuned characterizations of impacts, are among the opinion leaders on global climate change emissions policy.
