Hardly a week goes by without somebody telling President Bush that his passive approach to global warming is hopelessly behind the times, that asking industry for voluntary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions won't work and that what's needed is a regulatory regime that asks sacrifices of everyone. He's heard this from his political allies here and abroad - from Tony Blair, George Pataki and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to name three - and now he is hearing it from the heaviest hitters in the business world, including, most recently, Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric.

Mr. Immelt runs the biggest company in America, and for that reason some environmental groups hailed his speech last week on climate change as a tipping point in the global warming debate. Mr. Immelt chose his words carefully and did not directly criticize Mr. Bush. But he left no doubt that he believes mandatory controls on emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, are necessary and inevitable. And he said he would double investments by G.E. in energy and environmental technologies to prepare it for what he sees as a huge global market for products that help other companies - and countries like China and India - reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Mr. Immelt's speech is not the only sign of impatience among Mr. Bush's business allies. In New York, two dozen leading institutional investors managing more than $3 trillion in assets recently urged American companies to address the risks of climate change and to invest more heavily in strategies to reduce those risks. They met under the auspices of the United Nations Foundation and Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmental interests.

Perversely, the administration insists that all this voluntary activity will eliminate the need for a national strategy. Yet these gestures represent only a small slice of the economy; industry as a whole will not spend money to reduce emissions as long as the rules (or, more precisely, the absence of rules) confer a competitive advantage on the businesses that do nothing. Indeed, it is precisely to achieve a level playing field that more and more big utilities - the very companies Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney thought they were letting off the hook - are now calling on Congress to consider mandatory controls.

Absent a response from the administration, which still maintains, incredibly, that there is insufficient scientific understanding to justify mandatory limits, the country's best hope for meaningful action at the national level rests with the Senate, which will shortly take up an energy bill.

The bill by itself would not impose limits on emissions, although there is some talk that Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman may offer a bill imposing industrywide caps as an amendment on the Senate floor. But a properly drawn energy bill has the potential to do much good, especially if it avoids rewarding the old polluting industries, as the House version does, and focuses instead on putting serious money behind cleaner fuels, cleaner power plants and cleaner cars. That these measures would also ease the country's dependency on overseas oil is, of course, a persuasive side benefit.