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Many countries' already belated response to climate change is being further constrained by the reasonable fear that their industries will lose business to competitors in non-responding countries.

What approach can these early adopter countries take that protects their competitive position from late adopter countries yet increases the pace towards reducing greenhouse emissions?

Clearly this is a huge issue and related to other huge issues such as climate change and international governance and economics. Anyone with links to good information sources is invited to add these in comments. But the focus for this issue should, I think, be to seek technical approaches that achieve the above goal, and not to revisit these important related issues.

Here is an initial proposal:

1. The greenhouse emissions involved in producing goods and services used within the country are subject to the carbon tax or emission trading scheme requirements
2. The greenhouse emissions involved in producting goods and services that are exported are subject to a carbon tax or emission trading scheme requirement that is equivalent the level applied in the recipient country
3. Goods and services imported are subject to an additional tariff like charge equivalent to the carbon tax or emission trading scheme requirement  impact on import competing industries in the country less the effective impact in the source country
4. Some additional incentive, gradual at the start, be applied to favour imports from early adopter countries

What do you think? How should this be changed? Are there good web references that can be added to this article?

Contributors - jawbone

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