A Comparative Study Of China’s Low Carbon Policies

China will achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.As the name suggests,to achieve carbon neutrality is to reduce CO2 emissions and increase carbon sink so that the CO2 emissions of a country or region are equal to the carbon sequestration.To achieve carbon neutrality,China needs to consider the path of low-carbon development in the top-level design.This paper analyzes the mechanism of three possible low-carbon policies:carbon tax,carbon trading,and resource tax,and constructs a China Energy Environment Economy Analysis model(CEEEA model)to simulate the impact of these policies.The paper then puts forward the optimized policies for their disadvantages,conducts simulation analyses again,and comprehensively evaluates various low-carbon policies and their optimized strategies.To better compare the three low-carbon policies under the same benchmark,this paper utilizes the same emission path of all policies in the process of comparative analysis of each simulation;that is,the low-carbon policies simulated in this paper will eventually lead to the same emission mitigation path.Then,in the case of the same emission reduction capacity,the paper analyzes the different impacts of different low-carbon policies on different indicators.This paper finds that the resource tax has high emission reduction benefits but greatly improves the external dependence of energy;carbon tax has good emission reduction benefits,but a carbon tax is regressive and has a greater negative impact on residents;the impact of carbon trading in all aspects is relatively mild,but from the perspective of emission reduction benefits,it is not as good as the previous two policies.Resource tax is to increase the cost of energy use from the energy supply side,which directly affects the energy supply side and indirectly affects the energy demand side;carbon tax and carbon trading increase the cost of energy use from the energy demand side,directly affect the energy demand side,and indirectly affect the energy supply.The impact of different types of policies on import and export is quite different,which directly leads to the change of foreign dependence on different products.The biggest shortcomings of the three low-carbon policies are as follows:carbon tax shows strong regressivity;the cost-effectiveness of carbon trading is too low;resource tax may lead to energy security problems.This paper puts forward targeted optimization strategies for these three shortboards:subsidizing residents through tax cut or tax return to reverse the regressive effect of carbon tax;getting broader social responsibility for emission reduction by expanding the coverage of industries in carbon trading,or implementing carbon tax to supplement carbon trading mechanism to improve the efficiency of emission mitigation;levying the carbon tariff or primary energy import surtax to reduce energy dependence on foreign countries in the context of resource tax policy.It is found that most of the optimized policies meet the primary objectives,but individual patterns may lead to a bit of economic and welfare costs.This paper analyzes the changes of GDP,consumption,investment,foreign-trade dependence of commodities,carbon pricing(or tax rate),enterprise output,government tax,commodity price,social welfare,and so on.To comprehensively evaluate the benefits of these policies,this paper uses the comprehensive evaluation model based on the entropy weight method to evaluate the three policies and their optimized policies.The paper considers three aspects as the evaluation index:residents’ welfare,economic development,and energy security.The evaluation results highlight the comprehensive emission reduction benefits of resource tax,followed by carbon trading mechanism.In particular,the evaluation results show that the low-carbon policy of primary energy import surtax combined with resource tax is the best one among those policies.This optimized policy not only maintains good economic benefits,but also greatly reduces the energy security problems caused by resource tax itself,and has low impact on residents.Finally,according to the actual situation in China,this paper puts forward four targeted policy implications:the next step of China’s carbon trading system can be considered to implement full caliber carbon pricing through carbon tax;abstracting the energy use prices from the demand side and the supply side,and emphasizing the importance of full caliber carbon pricing;in order to prevent secondary taxation and its regressive effect,carbon tax should not be levied on residents;We can solve the problem of energy security by means of primary energy import surtax to make up for the shortage of resource tax.