Utah officials are unhappy that the Environmental Protection Agency won't allow California to impose its own strict standards to control tailpipe pollution, because that means Utah can't either. But they are not unhappy enough to join in a lawsuit challenging the EPA.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C., announced Wednesday that a coalition of environmental groups and states was asking the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, to overrule the EPA on the issue. The agency had denied a waiver requested by California that would have allowed it to impose stricter rules than the EPA's own.

States suing are California, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington, according to the NRDC.

Advocacy groups that also are plaintiffs are the NRDC, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Conservation Law Foundation, and the International Center for Technology Assessment.

Notably absent from the suit is Utah, which last year joined with California and other states in the Western Climate Initiative. That agreement is an attempt to lower the emissions of a key tailpipe pollutant, carbon dioxide, in order to reduce greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.

The suit came about three weeks after the EPA announced it would not give California a waiver to allow stricter standards to control tailpipe emissions. A release from the agency on Dec. 19 said the Bush administration is "moving forward with a national solution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from American vehicles."

It quoted EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson as saying the administration wants a clear national solution, "not a confusing patchwork of state rules." He noted that the EPA has determined that a unified federal standard requiring new cars to get an average of 35 miles per gallon will significantly reduce greenhouse gases from vehicles in all states.

David Doniger, policy director of the NRDC's climate center, told the Deseret Morning News on Wednesday that the group sees Utah as one of the states in the process of adopting the California rules. Therefore, Utah is counted as among "the 17 states other than California that are on board this train or getting on it."

Utah would have liked the option of imposing stricter standards than those required by the EPA, said Cheryl Heying, director of the Utah Division of Air Quality. "We were a bit disappointed to hear that the EPA went ahead and denied the waiver," she said. "We're very interested in anything the EPA can do to help us basically get to lower greenhouse emissions."

She thought the EPA and California could have worked out a compromise that Utah and other states could have used in lowering carbon dioxide emissions.

Reducing pollution from vehicles is a potential strategy under the Western Climate Initiative, Heying said. As a member of the initiative, Utah is looking at such factors as pollution from industry and from automobiles in figuring how to lower the pollution levels.

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