Recently, there is an animated discussion as to how trade and environment regimes may need to be more closely linked in the post Kyoto world. Although a wide range of studies have been done on carbon emissions from the perspective of individual countries in international trade, few studies have focused on newly industrialized countries (NICs) and have analyzed carbon footprint(CF) within a multi-country framework. We find that there is a great carbon leakage from developed countries to NICs such as China. There is a separation between the production-based inventories and consumption-based inventories, which often underestimates the CF in developed countries. Furthermore, rather than transferring production processes from one place to another, we claim that the challenge for trade policies is to ensure clean technologies being used by carbon-intensive industries. In view of these positions, we suggest that CF should be calculated according to consumption-based emission inventories so as to effectively eliminate carbon leakage. We may establish regional trade agreements or environmental protection unions with varying types of trade preferences towards low carbon new technologies. By so doing, we can better realize global carbon emission reduction.