China Nonferrous Metals Industry And Carbon Dioxide Emissions Decoupling Relationship

Historically, economic growth has been accompanied by growing environmental problems. Curbing greenhouse gas has become the Shared responsibility for the world. In2007, China contributed21%of global carbon dioxide emissions, which makes it the world’s largest emitter of CO2, according to the Key World Energy Statistics from the IEA (2009). Non-ferrous metal production is an energy-intensive and hence high CO2-emitting activity, as the largest nonferrous metals producer and the largest consumer in the world, China consumed65393370tee and emitted263.52million tons of CO2in2008, when, compared to1995, it consumed290%more energy and emitted314%more CO2, the pressure for CO2emission reduction is tremendous.The refined Laspeyres index approach is used in this paper to explore the impacts of industry activity, energy structure, energy intensity and emission factor on the total carbon dioxide emissions from Chinese nonferrous industry for the period1996-2008. In addition, we calculated the trend of decoupling effects on nonferrous metals industry in China by presenting a theoretical framework for decoupling, and analyzed the reasons for each phase. Furthermore, we calculate the decoupling index for the largest14provinces in order to assess the degree of decoupling between industrial growth and CO2emissions. Through the above analysis, we get the main conclusions as follows.(1) CO2emissions from the Chinese Nonferrous Metals Industry can be divided into two parts:direct CO2emissions and indirect CO2emissions. Indirect emissions caused by electricity consumption can not be ignored as they account for more than half of the total emissions.(2) As the results suggest, Chinese nonferrous metals industry has gone through four decoupling stages:strong negative decoupling stage (1996-1998), weak decoupling stage (1999-2000), expensive negative decoupling stage (2001-2003) and weak decoupling stage (2004-2008). Accelerating improvements in industrial energy efficiency is important for change from negative decoupling to decoupling. The industrial energy policies, such as emphasis on technological innovation, development of the recycling industry and acceleration of industrial adjustment, have positive effects on energy saving and decoupling.(3)The substantial growth in nonferrous metals production was the main factor that drove the huge increase in carbon emissions. This scale effect would have increased CO2emissions by136.90%had all other factors remained constant at1995levels. The change in energy mix, mainly due to the increased proportion of electric energy consumption, increased CO2emissions by5.01%. However, successful reduction in overall energy intensity of the industry resulted in CO2emissions declining by33%. Utility mix effect tries to reduce emission, and contributes to a reduction of8.90%for the whole period.(4)It is found that most provinces made a considerable effort on carbon reduction and obatin the corresponding effects, but not always sufficient for decoupling, while no decoupling phenomenon is observed in half of the provinces choosed.