Green Development Path Of China’s Metallurgical Industry In The Backdrop Of Low Carbon Economic Transition

In the context of global warming and environmental problems becoming increasingly prominent,realizing the transition to a low-carbon economy has become the key for China’s future sustainable development.In recent years,China’s economic development and industrialization have progressed rapidly.As one of the pillar industries of the national economy,the energy consumption and pollution emissions caused by the rapid development of the metallurgical industry have brought about tremendous pressure to energy conservation and emissions reduction.Therefore,realizing the green development of this key industry is of great significance for whole China’s low-carbon economic transition and global climate change mitigation.However,most domestic and foreign researches on the metallurgical industry focus on the aspects of engineering and technology,lacking systematic research on the quantitative evaluation of the green and low-carbon development as well as the policies and measures to achieve green development in the metallurgical industry.This dissertation focuses on China’s metallurgical industry,a typical energy intensive industry,and explores its green and low-carbon development performance and its green development path in order to get some useful enlightenments.Specifically,the main research contents and conclusions of this dissertation are as follows:First,the second and third chapters of this dissertation evaluate the green and lowcarbon development performance of the metallurgical industry in the past several years.It also discusses the driving factors affecting the green and low-carbon development performance from the perspective of regions and provinces.The results show that the carbon emission performance and energy performance of China’s metallurgical industry have improved,and technological progress is the biggest driving force to promote the improvement.Second,although the improvement of energy efficiency has always been regarded as an important measure to promote energy conservation and emissions reduction,the existence of the energy rebound effect has greatly reduced the energy conservation potential brought about by the improvement of energy efficiency.Therefore,Chapter 4 of this dissertation explores the energy rebound effect due to the energy efficiency improvement of China’s metallurgical industry,and further calculates the energy conservation potential of the metallurgical industry after considering the energy rebound effect.It turns out that the existence of the energy rebound effect makes it hard to achieve the green and low-carbon development of the metallurgical industry simply by improving energy efficiency.Third,based on the above contents,Chapters 5,6,and 7 of this dissertation discuss the impacts of some policies that are not affected by the rebound effect on the green development of China’s metallurgical industry,including carbon tax,reform of fossil energy subsidies,and elimination of resources misallocation based on the theory of elasticity of substitution.Also,the implementation effects of these policies are compared.Finally,based on the above contents,this dissertation puts forward some policy recommendations to promote the green development of China’s metallurgical industry,including the implementation of regionally differentiated supervision and management policies,promoting technological innovation,and accelerating the reform of factor marketization.