The highly expected legal challenge on behalf of California and 15 other states against the EPA decision to deny them the right to impose their own standards and regulations for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles finally took its course and brought the dispute to court.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. According to Jerry Brown, California’s attorney general, “the EPA has done nothing at the national level to curb greenhouse gases and now it has wrongfully and illegally blocked California’s landmark tailpipe emissions standards, despite the fact that 16 states have moved to adopt them.”(Reuters)

Following the December 19 decision of the Environmental Protection Agency, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said that legal measures are to be taken against the decision and that the EPA stood against “the will of millions of people in California and 16 other states who want us to take tough action against global warming.”

The petition of California and 16 other states was meant to cut gas emissions from automobiles by 30 percent by 2016, but the EPA, together with the Bush administration, said this would only create a “confusing patchwork of state rules” which they were trying to avoid.

The controversy also reached the Congress, where the matter came under the attention of Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Henry A. Waxman, who are prepared to verify whether the decision was absolutely correct and was not influenced by the White House or the unhappy automakers: “the thought has occurred that this was a political decision rather than an environmental decision and that cannot be countenanced,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the appropriations committee which oversees the agency’s funding, according to the Los Angeles Times.

California was accompanied in its legal attempt by states such as Massachusetts, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, , Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania, , Vermont or Washington, but these other states signed a separate petition filed by New York.