SACRAMENTO — Fifteen months after a similar effort died in Congress, California regulators adopted a system on Thursday for combating climate change that sets limits on greenhouse gas emissions and creates market incentives to encourage oil refineries, electricity generators and other polluters to clean up their plants.

The eight members of the Air Resources Board who were present gave a unanimous vote of approval. “We are charting new ground here,” said Lydia H. Kennard, a board member, just before the vote. “The country and the world are watching.” The plan will take effect in 2013.

The board members seemed keenly aware that they were giving the state a policy prescription regarded as poison in some parts of the country. But in an interview before the vote, the board’s chairwoman, Mary D. Nichols, invoked the state’s history of national environmental leadership, suggesting that if California acted first, the rest of the country would eventually come around.

“We are staking out new ground in the battle against global warming,” she said. “And we are doing it in difficult times and doing it in a way we believe others will want to follow.”