BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU envoys face a clash with member states over whether to charge all airlines using EU airports for their emissions after a parliamentary body on Thursday supported compromise plans to make carriers pay for part of their journeys.
The European Parliament's environment committee voted to regulate emissions over EU airspace for all flights via the bloc's Emissions Trading System and teed up a fast-track negotiation process with national governments.
The pressure is on to get agreement from all sides before the end of April, otherwise earlier legislation that provoked threats of a trade war would automatically reapply.
That law would have charged all flights in and out of EU airports for emissions over their entire journeys.
As a compromise, the European Commission - the EU's executive arm - proposed charging just for European airspace, cutting the amount of regulated emissions by two-thirds.
Despite opposition from other parliamentary committees, the 68-strong cross-party environment committee voted in favor of a modified version of the Commission's proposal.
Concern about angering trading partners such as China and the United States has prompted major EU powers, including Britain and France, to seek to maintain the current practice of regulating emissions from intra-EU flights only.
Germany also took that view, but the position of the new government in power since late last year is not clear.
"This is a very difficult situation," said Peter Liese, the German member of the European Parliament who will lead negotiations on a legal text, following the vote in Brussels.
The European Union in 2012 started charging all airlines using the bloc's airports for all of their emissions.
It suspended the law to give the U.N.'s global aviation body, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), time to craft a global measure to regulate the sector's rising output of heat-trapping gases.
Last October, the roughly 190 nations at ICAO agreed to design a global scheme by 2016 that would not take effect until 2020 but rejected letting Europe apply its own plan to foreign carriers in the meantime.
The major international airlines have objected strongly to the original EU law charging them for emissions over the entire length of their flights and to the plans to limit the charge to EU airspace.
Low-cost airlines, whose flights are almost exclusively European, have taken a different view. They say the Commission should not have caved into international pressure and torn up its original law.
(Reporting by Barbara Lewis in Brussels and Ben Garside in London; Editing by Dale Hudson)
