WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday rejected efforts to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s program to regulate greenhouse gases, defeating four bills that would have limited the agency’s attempts to address global warming.

The Senate voted as the House was debating a measure that would also halt the regulations by repealing the agency’s scientific finding that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are endangering human health and the environment. That bill is expected to pass the House on Thursday. President Obama has vowed to veto any such measure if it should reach his desk.

In the Senate, a virtually identical bill sponsored by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, both Republicans, was attached to an unrelated small-business bill. The measure drew 50 votes, including 4 from Democrats, but fell shy of the 60 needed to avert a filibuster.

Democratic alternatives that would impose less extreme limits on the E.P.A. regulation drew as many as 12 votes, putting the White House on notice that it risks further party defections unless it moderates the scale and pace of its proposed carbon rules.