WASHINGTON, July 27 ・Senators John McCain and Joseph I. Lieberman are planning to compel a vote on an effort to control global warming when the Senate takes up an energy bill this week.

While the two senators concede that their amendment to the energy bill is likely to fail, they said they thought the debate would help generate political pressure on an issue that had prompted volumes of political discussion but little federal legislative action.

"You want to take votes to put people on the record, to make them take responsibility for their positions," said Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona.

The proposed amendment would set limits on emissions of greenhouse gases from wide swaths of the economy, with exemptions for households, agriculture and small facilities that emit less than a certain amount. However, to ease the impact of those constraints, the proposal would let entities buy and sell the rights to emit more gases under strict limits, using an economic framework similar to the highly successful 1990 acid rain reduction program. Theoretically, reductions would become more cost-efficient as polluters that could reduce their carbon dioxide emissions most cheaply would do so and then could sell their unused pollution rights to others.

The proposed amendment is an adaptation of a proposal that is held up in the Environmental and Public Works Committee. Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the committee, opposes the McCain-Lieberman amendment, characterizing it as a backdoor carrying out of the Kyoto Protocol, a binding treaty on climate change that the Clinton administration signed but that the Senate never approved. The Bush administration drew criticism when it later withdrew from the protocol.

"This is one where it's important to be independent and confrontational," said Mr. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. "Because if you are not, the problem is not going to go away. It's just going to get worse."

Unlike other proposals that include carbon dioxide reduction, the McCain-Lieberman amendment addresses multiple industries. Senator James M. Jeffords, independent of Vermont, and Senator Thomas R. Carper, Democrat of Delaware, have introduced legislation that includes carbon dioxide regulation, but is limited to the power industry.

The Bush administration opposes the McCain-Lieberman amendment and carbon dioxide regulation in general.

Many senators are torn between growing public concern about global warming and industry's contentions that carbon dioxide regulations are misguided, unwieldy and essentially amount to an energy tax. The Bush administration brokered voluntary emissions reduction targets with industry this year, but they were criticized as being emissions increases in disguise because the targets were not absolute, but were based on the size of the economy.

According to Senate staff members, Democratic and Republican senators have asked their leaders to prevent a vote.

But environmental groups are welcoming the effort by the amendment's powerful, centrist sponsors, Mr. McCain and Mr. Lieberman.

"We have had this conspiracy of silence in taking the next step and doing something about global warming," said Jeremy Symons, manager of the National Wildlife Federation's climate change program.

Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, which is running newspaper and television advertisements to support the amendment, said: "It's the first serious discussion at the federal level. The ballgame is changing."

Even some conservative groups that doubt human activity contributes to global warming say they welcome a vote. "It will let us know who our friends are and whom we need to educate further on this issue," said Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which opposes controls on greenhouse gases.

But Mr. Ebell said support for the proposal was likely to be inflated by senators worried about maintaining environmentally friendly images. "You are likely to vote for it because you know it's going to fail and you don't want a black mark from the League of Conservation and the Sierra Club in their vote ratings," he said.

The McCain-Lieberman proposal has two stages: one that would begin in 2010, limiting emissions to 2000 levels, and one that would begin in 2016, which would hold emissions to 1990 levels.

The principles behind the amendment have drawn limited industry support as some corporations have concluded that regulation of carbon dioxide is inevitable, given that some foreign governments are continuing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and state governments are passing legislation to control global warming.

Public pressure on corporations is also building ・often from within business itself. Investor groups, those that are environmentally conscious and those that are not, have introduced shareholder resolutions to deal with climate change. One such resolution garnered 27 percent of shareholder support at the April shareholder meeting for American Electric Power, the company that is the country's highest emitter of carbon dioxide. Another resolution on climate change introduced at Exxon Mobil's annual meeting in May drew 21 percent shareholder support.

Companies are indicating they prefer the certainty of federal standards to an uncertain patchwork of local regulations and, thus, the cap-and-trade concept has drawn limited support from some Fortune 500 companies, including Alcoa and DuPont.

"They have really tried to take into account a lot of the different interests," said Lee Califf, Alcoa's director of government affairs. "We endorse the concept, but not the bill. A lot of the details about how the system would work are not clear."