Energy Consumption, Carbon Emissions And Economic Growth In China

Energy as a factor of production, plays such an important role in economic development. The extensive use of energy ensures the sustainable development of modern economy and society. But continued to increase in using energy, it will inevitably lead to the increasing of greenhouse gases. In all greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide accounts for the largest share.As the largest developing country, the largest energy consumer, and the largest carbon dioxide emissions in the world, the study on China’s carbon dioxide emissions has become the common focus by academic circles and governments. This is the initial results of the subject from the National Bureau of Statistics, which is "Study on establishment of energy statistical techniques to adapt to the circular economy and to measure carbon emissions (2010LC44)".Against the background of low-carbon economy in the international community, China as a developing country which under the premise of keeping high economic growth, how to realize a reasonable carbon dioxide reduction target is a problem urgently needs to solve. Therefore, detailed analysis of the related issues arising from energy consumption and economic development, research on constraint effect of consumption constraints to sustainable development, and analysis of carbon dioxide emissions from the energy consumption, they have great significance to implement comprehensively the scientific approach on the development, to achieve economic stability and sustainable development, and to slow down global warming.This paper selects the time series data of Chinese energy consumption, carbon emissions and economic growth from 1980 to 2011. Through the empirical analysis between the three variates, the main conclusions are as follows:① Chinese energy consumption is distinctively characterized as large volume, growing faster, small proportion of clean energy share in total energy consumption, low efficiency use of energy. Chinese energy consumption and carbon emissions, present a more obvious stage characteristics. The total amount of Chinese energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, but the per capita amount is small. Within a certain time sequence, it is characterized by fast growth, steady growth and rapid growth in the three stage.From the point of energy consumption structure,79.9 percent of carbon emissions comes from coal-based fuel energy,12.2 percent from petroleum-based fuel energy, and only 12.2 percent from natural gas.② From 1980 to 2011, Chinese energy-related carbon dioxide emissions has an gradual upward tendency. Chinese energy consumption structure will still remain dominated by coal for a long time to come. In this paper, we use extended model of IPAT to empirically investigate the effects of population size, population urbanization ratio, resident per capita consumption, and energy consumption intensity on the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions. Through the empirical results, we can see that the population size is an important factor affecting the amount of carbon dioxide emissions. And then, by means of the quantitative analysis, we conclude that there exists a " N" shape curve relationship between Chinese per carbon dioxide emissions and real per capita gross domestic product. This indicates that Chinese per carbon emissions is in line with the hypothesis of Environment Kuznets Curve.③ Under the energy constraint, we put the energy as an input into the economic growth model, and analyze the influence mechanism of the steady-state economic growth. At the same time, we conduct an empirical analysis on the influence of Chinese energy consumption on economic growth from 1980 to 2011. The result confirms again that energy is essential to economic growth in the modern production system.