After hours of bitter debate, lawmakers voted 219-212 late Friday to put the US economy under a "cap-and-trade" system for managing carbon emissions. The battle on how to confront global warming now shifts to the US Senate, where the prospects for action this year are uncertain.

"With today's historic vote, Congress has taken the first step toward unleashing a true clean energy revolution," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, the biggest US environmental group.

"While imperfect, it sets forth a set of goals America must achieve -- and exceed," he added in a statement.

The bill's "most important achievement," Pope stressed, was its goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The House's "American Clean Energy and Security Act" also aims to trim emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, create "green" jobs and wean the US economy from oil imports.

The 1,200-page bill, the fruit of months of tough negotiations, would create a "cap-and-trade" system limiting overall pollution from large industrial sources and then allocating and selling pollution permits.

"This vote was a major hurdle, and we've cleared it," said Union of Concerned Scientists president Kevin Knobloch, ahead of global climate talks in Copenhagen in December that aim to strike a new agreement on rolling back global warming.

"Now, we have momentum to move and improve legislation in the Senate and put it on President Obama's desk so he can go to December's international summit in Copenhagen with the full backing of the Congress and the American people."

The Democratic-crafted measure would require utilities, by 2020, to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable resources -- solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass -- and show annual energy savings of five percent from efficiency measures.

But the targets fall short of a European Union plan, which calls for getting 20 percent of all electricity from renewable resources by 2020.

"While there are troubling shortcomings in the bill, it begins the critical process of putting us on a clean energy pathway here and around the world," said Raymond Offenheiser, president of the international development and rights group Oxfam America.

The bill, Offenheiser said, "finally addresses the immediate needs of vulnerable communities everywhere who are being hit first and worst by the negative impacts of climate change."

For Al Gore, the former vice-president turned global warming campaigner, the bill "is one of the most important pieces of legislation Congress will ever pass."

The next step, he added in a statement, is passage of the measure by the Senate "to help restore America's leadership in the world and begin, at long last, to put in place a truly global solution to the climate crisis."

But US business groups deplored the vote through the Chamber of Commerce, the largest business federation in the world representing over three million businesses and organizations.

The chamber said the legislation could lead to an annual drop of 170 billion dollars in 2015 of the gross domestic product, of 350 billion in 2030 and 730 billion in 2050, along with a net loss of 2.3 to three million jobs, a figure the group said included all "green" jobs created.

The US Environmental Protection Agency released a study this week showing that implementing the legislation would cost 80-111 dollars per US household per year, while the Congressional Budget Office says it would run about 175 dollars.

"Unfortunately, Congress has fallen short with this bill," said William Kovacs, the chamber's senior vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs.

The legislation, Kovacs added, "fails to ensure that enough renewable or alternative energy sources" will be brought online to compensate for reductions in energy from fossil fuels through the cap-and-trade system.

He namely pressed for consideration of nuclear and coal energy as such alternative energy sources.