Topeka ? Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt announced Thursday that he has joined 15 other states in asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to delay implementing new limits on carbon pollution from power plants.

The states are asking for the delay to give courts enough time to review the rules.

The EPA unveiled its Clean Power Plan this week as part of a strategy to address the threat of global climate change.

It calls for a nationwide 32 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, and it requires states to adopt their own plans for regulating power plants within their borders to meet those targets.

Without addressing the environmental dangers of climate change, Schmidt harshly criticized the EPA’s rules, saying they infringe on states’ rights and will be costly for consumers.

“”Masked within the regulation’s mind-numbing tedium is the reality that this new regulation will ultimately cost Kansas consumers and ratepayers enormous sums of money and should not be implemented without proper judicial review to determine whether the people’s elected representatives in Congress actually gave EPA the authority it now claims,” Schmidt said in a statement released Thursday.

“This new rule appears to have less to do with ‘clean power’ than with centralized economic planning in the energy sector of our economy,” he said.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the EPA does have the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, within certain limits. That followed a ruling in 2007 in which the court suggested the EPA had a duty to regulate carbon pollution, and it rebuked the George W. Bush administration for declining to adopt tighter emission standards for new vehicles.

But it also ruled earlier this year that the EPA must take into account the cost of new regulations before adopting them, and Schmidt has argued that in this case, the agency failed to do so.

In a joint letter to the EPA, the 16 attorneys general said that without a stay, the new rules will “coerce the States to expend enormous public resources and to put aside sovereign priorities to prepare State Plans of unprecedented scope and complexity.”