WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rice challenged the world’s biggest polluters today to find ways to shift toward energy sources that reduce global warming, without harming their economies.

She made clear the American preference for voluntary measures, determined by each nation, to help stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide and other industrial gases that are heating the atmosphere like a greenhouse.

“Let me emphasize that this is not a one-size-fits-all effort,” Ms. Rice said at the start of a two-day climate meeting called by President Bush. “Though united by common goals and collective responsibilities, all nations should tackle climate change in the ways that they deem best.”

America — which has committed only to slowing the growth rate of its greenhouse gases — lined up with China, India, and other major polluters in opposition to mandatory cuts in Earth-warming greenhouse gases sought by the United Nations and European countries under the Kyoto Protocol. Mr. Bush rejected the treaty, which expires in 2012, because it requires mandatory cuts among industrialized nations and excludes fast-growing economies like China and India.

Ms. Rice said the challenge of global climate change depends on working with businesses to develop cleaner-burning cars and other new technologies “in a way that does not starve economies of the energy they need to grow, and that does not widen the already significant income gap between developed and developing nations.”

“Managing the status quo is simply not an adequate response,” she said. “We must cut the Gordian knot of fossil fuels, carbon emissions, and economic activity. This current system is no longer sustainable, and we must transcend it entirely through a revolution in energy technology.”

The key is what will succeed the Kyoto accord in 2012. The top U.N. climate official, Yvo de Boer, told the 16 nations participating in the White House-led meeting that “this relatively small group of countries holds a key to tackling a big part of the problem” but that their response can succeed only by “going well beyond present efforts.”

Germany’s environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said in an interview on German radio today that he was not overly concerned about the Bush administration’s attitude toward the global talks.

“We all know that they will be out of office in a few months,” he said on NDR Info radio.

About 70 demonstrators from Greenpeace and other environmental groups gathered today outside the State Department, where dozens were arrested for refusing to leave the premises after two hours of protest. The activists called the conference a “fraud” for not encouraging mandatory cuts in greenhouse gasses.

“I’m here to protest the fact that we are having a climate conference when we should have been signing the Kyoto agreement,” Lauren Siegel, 23, of New York, said as she was loaded into a police van. “This is a diversion,” she said of the conference.

Though the meeting includes Britain, France, Germany, and other nations in the Kyoto accord, many European officials expressed concern that Mr. Bush’s meeting would sidetrack the U.N. negotiations that have been the main forum for addressing global warming.

“We can’t do this on the basis of talking about talking or setting goals to set goals,” a special representative on climate change for the British foreign secretary, John Ashton, said in an interview. “We know that a voluntary approach to global warming is about as effective as a voluntary speed limit sign in the road. We don’t just need an approach that works; we need an approach that works very quickly.”

A White House statement said the meeting will emphasize creating more diplomatic processes to find a solution to global warming, rather than setting firm goals for reducing carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for heating up the atmosphere.

Despite the emphasis on bureaucracy, the chairman of the White House Council of Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, told participants: “This has to be about more than presentations.”

Mr. Bush’s meeting has competed for attention with the climate change summit held Monday in New York City, at which U.N. Secretary-General Ban warned 80 world leaders that “the time for doubt has passed” and urged fast action to save future generations from potentially ruinous effects of global warming.

As they consider ways to curb greenhouse gases, developing nations expressed a preference for U.N.-sponsored talks to decide on a post-2012 strategy and said they not want to give up ground toward industrializing — and meeting basic human needs.

“For a developing country, the main task is to reduce poverty,” the vice chairman of China’s national development and reform commission, Xie Zhenhua, said yesterday.

Mexico’s environment minister agreed. “We have always to bear in mind that half our population is at the poverty line,” Juan Rafael Elvira Quesada said. “We are also extremely concerned about the consequences, the adverse effects of climate change.”