More than three-quarters of Americans support the government taking action to reduce carbon emissions, according to new polling, but that consensus doesn't seem to be boosting the climate legislation moving through Congress, where Democratic lawmakers are increasingly divided on the issue and Republicans are almost universally aligned against the Kerry-Boxer bill.

"By and large, congressional opinion tends to run behind public opinion, sometimes pretty substantially," said Mark Mellman, CEO of the Democratic polling company The Mellman Group. Mellman conducted the polling in conjunction with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, partner and co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies. The pollsters released their findings Monday morning at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Seventy-seven percent of respondents in the poll said they favor "the United States taking action to reduce its emissions of gases like carbon dioxide that cause global warming," and that includes almost 60 percent of those who identified themselves as either conservative or Republican. That percentage jumps to more than 90 percent among liberal or Democratic respondents.

The results have been somewhat different, however, when pollsters ask more specifically about cap-and-trade. The Pew Research Center recently asked respondents if they favor "setting limits on carbon dioxide emissions and making companies pay for their emissions." Only half said yes -- 36 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats.

Mellman believes that Democratic lawmakers will ultimately coalesce around a climate bill, despite the geographical and ideological divides creating intraparty rifts now. "At the end of the day, you're going to see most of the Democrats united behind some effort toward resolving this issue as we saw in the House," Mellman said, referring to the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill in June. (211 Democrats voted for it, 44 against. Only eight Republicans voted for it.) "We saw those early divisions in the House, and by and large Democrats came together in sufficient numbers to pass the legislation."

As for congressional Republicans, McInturff suggested that their opposition to cap-and-trade is partly political. "There are two confluences. One is the actual policy and two is the perspective of, 'Are you helping President Obama?'" he said. "Part of the pressure on these Republicans is to not be seen as the deciding vote to help a major Obama initiative."

But cap-and-trade is a market-based system that Republicans should philosophically support, McInturff argued. Referring back to the first federally created cap-and-trade system regulating sulfur dioxide in the 1990s, McInturff said that it "worked incredibly well... without a lot of economic dislocation."

McInturff added that support among conservatives and Republicans across the country for reducing emissions is evidence that the GOP needs to "get onboard the alternative energy bandwagon."

"The Republican Party needs to have an alternative energy position," he said. "There's a lot of latitude in terms of public support to be in a little bit different position than the Republican Party is today."

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