LAURIE TAKES THE AOL CALL. A petite brunette with the requisite whittled Hollywood physique, she greets Tina Sharkey, a senior vice president at AOL, with her trademark trill: "Hey, doll, what's cookin'?" Jimmy Choo mules dangle from her painted toes; Post-it Notes and news clippings, along with books, articles, diagrams of Arctic ice melt, and a mosaic of inspirational quotes, surround her computer screen.

Laurie's cheeky style of negotiating seems to pay off, because Sharkey is calling to say that AOL will donate space on its home page for a link to StopGlobalWarming.org. "You have the support of the network on this," Sharkey vows. "We want to help blow it up."

Next on the line is Christina Exharo, executive vice

As Laurie sees it, the green movement's approach to educating the public is a mild mug of green tea. She's a gallon of Red Bull.

president for marketing at MTV, who wants to review the network's plans to promote the march on its cable channels and Web sites. Then it's Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, phoning to discuss "The Heat Is On," a one-hour global-warming report that his network will air this fall, thanks in large part to Laurie's badgering.

"The biggest economic, environmental, and national-security problem of our time is global warming, and the media is completely out to lunch on this issue!" Laurie told Ailes after cornering him at a New York gathering last winter. "Here's a chance to put Fox News ahead of the pack." Instead of recoiling, Ailes was charmed by what he calls Laurie's "impressive passion and dedication." Today he says, without apparent irony, that he considers her one of the country's "leading authorities" on global warming.

Throughout the day, Laurie confabs with entertainment bigwigs, at times working outside, via cell phone, so she can deadhead her roses while juggling a long list of projects. High on the agenda is Earth to America, a two-hour comedy special she's producing—with help from stars like Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Ben Stiller, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus—about the decidedly humorless topic of global warming, scheduled to air November 20 on TBS. (Long a rerun graveyard, TBS is repositioning itself as a comedy network and was the highest bidder for the show.) Too Hot Not to Handle, a 90-minute HBO documentary on climate change's local impacts—such as glacier melt in Alaska—will air in April.

Along with the HBO special, Laurie is planning a blowout media event—a star-studded concert, maybe—to announce the success of her Virtual March. In the meantime, she's cooking up new ways to hype it, from ads on yogurt lids to TV tie-ins. In December, she says, characters on three daytime soaps—All My Children, The Bold and the Beautiful, and The Young and the Restless—will start talking about the march in their on-air dialogue.

It's all part of Laurie's master plan: to make global warming a priority for mainstream America by creating a humor-spiked, irony-laced media juggernaut. It's a mission she thinks is especially timely in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which Laurie—who points out that warmer oceans create more intense storms—describes as a warning to us all.

"If the problem goes unchecked, the hurricanes of the future," she says, "could make Katrina look like a spring shower." That's coming on pretty strong, but that's the way Laurie likes it. To her, the green movement's current approach to educating the public is as dull as a mug of green tea. She's a gallon of Red Bull.