Empirical Study On The Effects Of China's Energy Consumption And Carbon Emissions Changes

Global climate change is the most complex and most significant environmental problems in 21st century. According to IPCC report, the possibility of more than 90% is due to human activities. The international climate negotiations in order to reduce anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases from different countries to slow global climate change as a key initiative, which is in the protection of environment for human survival, while affect the process of modernization and sustainable development of developing countries directly. Global carbon dioxide emissions issue is not only a hot issue in academic circles at home and abroad, but also the focus of governments'common concern. China is the world's largest carbon emitters. To consider China's carbon emissions is not only conducive to China's sustainable development, but also able to mitigate global climate change and make outstanding contributions.Chinese fossil-fuel carbon emissions which are caused by energy consumption account for about 90% of the total. What is the trend of the change in the long run, and which are main factors to impact China's carbon emissions? Among various factors on the short-term contribution to carbon emissions, what are the extent of long term and the trend of changes? Whether the factors which have impact on carbon emissions contribute to a stable value in the long run? How much is their flexibility? This paper does the following research and tries to answer the above questions.To study carbon emissions resulting from China's energy consumption, firstly this paper use the "reference method", recommended by IPCC, to estimate the China's carbon emissions from 1985 to 2007, in order to analyses temporal changes in carbon emissions of China and the main features of their root causes. Then we use LMDI factor decomposition to study factors, affecting to carbon emissions of China. The results show that economic development lead to a major factor in continuing increase in carbon emissions. Cumulative contribution rate has reached 142.64% until 2007. Energy consumption is a main factor to reduce the carbon emissions intensity, the cumulative contribution rate of which is -56.72%. However, the structure of energy consumption to reduce carbon emissions contributes little in further illustrating the "coal" in the energy consumption structure as one of the main reasons for the high carbon emissions. At the same time, after calculating China's carbon emissions in theory and in practice, the study found that China has reached great economic progress while still achieved a large number of emission reduction. To study carbon emissions of industry in China to conduct a decomposition analysis of differences, this research found that the factors in the industry is clear difference, including economic development remains one of the main leading factor of the continuing increase in carbon emissions. Finally, this paper discussed the laws of various factors in the long term impact of China's carbon emissions, verification of carbon emissions Kuznets curve, and the establishment of carbon emissions in China Multi-factor log-linear model. Carbon EKC model simulation results show that carbon emissions and economic development in China showed less obvious "N-type" wave curve, indicating that there are appropriate and effective economic policies to make the coordination between carbon emissions and economic development; carbon multi-factor log-linear model of estimation results show that in the long run, the energy consumption structure and economic development factors on vehicle emission contribute to a stable value of flexibility, where population effect contributes maximum to the value of flexibility on carbon emissions growth, while the energy effect has a minimum contribution. The differences of the flexibility between factors further revealed China's energy consumption, economic growth and demographic characteristics.