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EISEROWITZ'S STUDY OF risk perception found that Americans fall into "interpretive communities"—cliques, if you will, sharing similar demographics, risk perceptions, and worldviews.

On one end of this spectrum are the naysayers: those who perceive climate change as a very low or nonexistent danger. Leiserowitz found naysayers to be "predominantly white, male, Republican, politically conservative, holding pro-individualism, pro-hierarchism, and anti-egalitarian worldviews, anti-environmental attitudes, distrustful of most institutions, highly religious, and to rely on radio as their main source of news."

This group presented five rationales for rejecting danger: belief that global warming is natural; belief that it's media/environmentalist hype; distrust of science; flat denial; and conspiracy theories, including the belief that researchers create data to ensure job security

We might wonder how these naysayers, who represent only 7 percent of Americans yet control much of our government, got to be the way they are. A study of urban American adults by Nancy Wells and Kristi Lekies of Cornell University sheds some light on environmental attitudes. Wells and Lekies found that children who play unsupervised in the wild before the age of 11 develop strong environmental ethics. Children exposed only to structured hierarchical play in the wild—through, for example, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, or by hunting or fishing alongside supervising adults—do not. To interact humbly with nature we need to be free and undomesticated in it. Otherwise, we succumb to hubris in maturity. The fact that few children enjoy free rein outdoors anymore bodes poorly for our future decision-makers.

THE ALARMISTS AND THE ACROBAT ON THE OTHER END of Leiserowitz's spectrum of perception regarding global warming is an interpretive community he calls the alarmists, generally comprised of individuals holding pro-egalitarian, anti-individualist, and antihierarchical worldviews, who are supportive of government policies to mitigate climate change, even so far as raising taxes. Members of this group are likely to have taken personal action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Collectively, alarmists compose 11 percent of Americans, with the remaining interpretive communities falling considerably closer to the alarmists than the naysayers in the spectrum—suggesting the gap might be cinched by sustained public education on the neighborhood dangers likely to arise in a changed global climate.

Hurricane Katrina provided a wake-up call for how bad it can get in the neighborhood, and may prove a tipping point itself.

Yet long before its rampage, American kids were coloring pictures of the first icon of global environmentalism, the Amazon. Its billion-plus acres of rivers and rainforest—its trees collecting and containing excessive greenhouse gases from the atmosphere—were our primer for the revolutionary notion that the earth's neighborhoods are interdependent. Today Amazonia is the most famous of Schellnhuber's tipping points. For a generation, kids have grown up learning that the Amazon is at risk from massive deforestation. But even if clearcutting were to halt, climate models forecast that a warming globe will convert the wet Amazonia forest into savanna within this century, and the loss of trees will render the region a net CO2 producer, further accelerating global warming.

In California, AB32 is economy-wide and would result in 174 million tons of emissions reductions.

Instead of opposing AB32, the market-based flexibility that the bill embraces has convinced the giant Northern California utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), to support the bill, as do a wide range of Silicon Valley companies and venture capitalists, that have been investing heavily in the clean and renewable energy sector. In fact, studies from my research group at UC Berkeley, as well as macroeconomic models of the state economy prepared for the California Environmental Protection Agency, both find that an investment in clean energy will likely bring economic benefits to the state in the form of significant numbers of new jobs and export opportunities for what is becoming known as the ''clean tech'' sector.

AB32 will have a transforming effect on power generation and greenhouse-gas emissions far beyond California. Power providers, that sell into the huge California market, will be subject to the cap-and-trade provisions through the utilities, including PG&E, that sell their energy. California has thus effectively utilized market forces to not only find the most cost-effective ways to reduce emissions and inefficient uses of energy, but also to encourage innovation to bring solar, wind, clean bio-fuels and other forms of renewable energy into the market.

Daniel M. Kammen is the Class of 1935 distinguished professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-directs the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and is founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL). He has appointments in the Energy and Resources Group and the Goldman School of Public Policy.