The Environmental Protection Agency was accused of “foot-dragging” to avoid regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. More that 18 states sued the Bush administration for taking no action concerning the issue of global warming.

In a petition signed Wednesday several states’ officials had required the EPA to think about and decide whether greenhouse emissions, including carbon dioxide produced by motor vehicles, should be regulated or not.

The complainants include Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and attorneys general from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia, plus representatives of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the cities of New York and Baltimore, and several environmental organizations, the A.P. reports.

EPA had no reaction to this petition. It was supposed to decide within 60 days.

“The EPA's failure to act in the face of these incontestable dangers is a shameful dereliction of duty,” Coakley told the Associated Press.

According to the AP, David Brookbinder of the Sierra Club, one of eleven environmental groups that participate at the suit, has been considering the climate change issue from a “holistic” point of view for years. Instead of reacting and deciding to do something, they have chosen to stay in the way of everybody else who was trying to take action, he added.

Above all, EPA had announced last week that the agency wanted to put greenhouse gas regulation “on indefinite hold,” as Jim Milkey, chief of environmental protection at Coakley’s office, said. He was the first one who argued the case before the Supreme Court.