China's Growing CO2 Emissions-A Race between Increasing Consumption and Efficiency Gains

详细信息    查看全文

• 作者：Glen P. Peters ; Christopher L. Weber ; Dabo Guan ; Klaus Hubacek
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2007
• 出版时间：September 1, 2007
• 年：2007
• 卷：41
• 期：17
• 页码：5939 - 5944
• 全文大小：175K
• 年卷期：v.41,no.17(September 1, 2007)
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

China's rapidly growing economy and energy consumptionare creating serious environmental problems on bothlocal and global scales. Understanding the key driversbehind China's growing energy consumption and theassociated CO₂ emissions is critical for the developmentof global climate policies and provides insight into how otheremerging economies may develop a low emissionsfuture. Using recently released Chinese economic input-output data and structural decomposition analysis weanalyze how changes in China's technology, economicstructure, urbanization, and lifestyles affect CO₂ emissions.We find that infrastructure construction and urbanhousehold consumption, both in turn driven by urbanizationand lifestyle changes, have outpaced efficiency improvements in the growth of CO₂ emissions. Net trade had a smalleffect on total emissions due to equal, but significant,growth in emissions from the production of exports andemissions avoided by imports. Technology and efficiencyimprovements have only partially offset consumption growth,but there remains considerable untapped potential toreduce emissions by improving both production andconsumption systems. As China continues to rapidly developthere is an opportunity to further implement and extendpolicies, such as the Circular Economy, that will help Chinaavoid the high emissions path taken by today's developedcountries.