| In recent years,climate change caused by large-scale greenhouse gas emissions has become an important topic of international concern.The increasingly severe environmental issues have attracted widespread attention from the international community and the global carbon trading market is booming.China’s rapid development has led to high energy consumption and carbon emissions and China’s commitment to carbon reduction in the international community has brought tremendous pressure on its own sustainable development.Under such background,China proposed a pilot project for carbon emission rights in 2011 in seven provinces and cities: Beijing,Tianjin,Shanghai,Chongqing,Guangdong,Hubei,and Shenzhen.Extensive discussions have been conducted in existing literature regarding the establish-ment and function of carbon trading markets,including whether policy implementation has achieved expected emission reductions and whether there are spillover effects.However,few studies have explored the energy-saving effects resulting from this policy.Based on an analysis of the development status of pilot carbon trading markets,this paper raises two research ques-tions: first,whether China’s carbon market has generated energy-saving and emission reduction effects during the pilot phase,and second,whether the policy effects of carbon trading pilots will result in spillover effects.Based on energy consumption and carbon emissions data from 30 provinces and cities in China from 2005 to 2019(excluding Tibet,Hong Kong,Macao,and Taiwan),this article discusses the impact of the carbon emissions trading pilot policy from the perspectives of energy conservation and emission reduction.Due to the difficulty of obtaining indicators from various aspects in Shenzhen alone,it is considered uniformly in Guangdong.This paper investigate the impact of carbon emission trading pilot policy from the perspectives of energy conservation and emission reduction,and use the synthetic control method to conduct quasi-natural experiments to analyze the policy effects of the carbon trading pilot.At the same time,we introduce a policy virtual variable into the dynamic spatial Durbin model to explore the spatial spillover effects of the policy.This study mainly concludes that:(1)Carbon trading policies have significant energy-saving and emissions reduction effects in pilot areas,but there is heterogeneity in the energy-saving and emissions reduction effects among different pilot provinces and cities.The policy effects are most significant in the first 1-2years after implementation.From the perspective of energy saving,Tianjin,Chongqing,and Hubei have significant energy-saving effects,and Guangdong had significant energy-saving effects in the early stages of policy implementation,but its energy-saving effect weakened continuously after 2017.From the perspective of emissions reduction,Tianjin and Chongqing have the best emissions reduction effects,and Hubei and Guangdong had significant emissions reduction effects in the early stages of policy implementation.However,in the later stages of policy implementation,the emissions reduction effects gradually weakened.The fitting effect of Beijing and Shanghai was not good,but overall energy consumption and carbon emissions are declining year by year.(2)Carbon trading policy has significant spatial spillover effects on non-pilot areas,which significantly suppress energy consumption and carbon emissions in those areas.However,the promotion of energy conservation and emissions reduction in pilot areas is much greater than the spillover effect on non-pilot areas.From the perspective of energy conservation,the spillover effect of carbon trading policy on adjacent non-pilot areas has a time lag,meaning that it only has a suppressive effect on energy consumption in surrounding areas one year after policy implementation.From the perspective of emissions reduction,the spillover effect of carbon trading policy on adjacent non-pilot areas does not have a time lag,meaning that it has a suppressive effect on carbon emissions in neighboring non-pilot areas immediately after policy implementation.These prove that China’s carbon emissions trading pilot policy has significant results in energy conservation and emission reduction,especially in the early stages of policy implementation;At the same time,the effect of reducing emissions appears faster than that of saving energy.On this basis,the following four suggestions are proposed: Firstly,it is possible to consider promoting pilot experience throughout the country.Secondly,form a social participation mechanism to increase the total volume of emissions reduction transactions.Thirdly,improve the trading rules of the emission reduction market and strengthen industry supervision.Fourthly,coordinate development and strengthen green connections between regions. |
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