Estimate The Embodied Carbon Emissions And Study The Influence Factors In The Sino-US Trade

Climate change has become an increasing concern to the international community.Among all emissions, carbon dioxide emission is the most direct cause to thegreenhouse effects. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions has become a common goalaround the world. As a developing country, China’s rapid economic growth hasdrastically promoted the growth of carbon emissions. Beginning in2009, China hassurpassed the U.S. to be the most carbon emitting country. As a result, China iscurrently facing tremendous pressure from the international community and thenatural environment.The emergence of international trade allowed the production and consumption ofgoods to be separated geographically, which caused actual carbon emissions to beimplicit. The production of a commodity could be carried out in a country while theconsumption would take place in another. Embodied carbon emitting responsibilitieswhich are commonly transferred will gradually become the focus of global attention.In this study, the input-output model was applied to estimate the embodied carbonemissions created by China-US trade to provide some insightful information to helpChina in international climate negotiations. The analysis showed that between2000and2010, China has increasingly assumed more responsibilities for the embodiedcarbon emission on the exporting goods to the US. Chinese which exports to theUnited States carries the implicit carbon emissions showing growth. In ten years, thecumulative carbon emissions produced in China grew by about4.4times, in whichChina assumed majority of the implicit carbon emissions of the US-China trade. Thedistribution analysis of carbon missions concluded that three major categories of thecarbon emitting products were traditional electrical/mechanical equipmentmanufacturing (8150.88Mt), general/specialized equipment manufacturing(7994.83Mt), and chemical/plastic/rubber manufacturing (3826.29Mt).In international trade, the flow of goods would inevitably lead to carbon emission transfers among different nations. In order to reveal the implicit factors to the growthof carbon emissions in China and provide a reference to domestic policy formulationon industrial structure modification, energy structure adjustment, and energy savingsguidelines, this article also utilized structural decomposition method SDA(structuraldecomposition analysis). The results inferred that between2000and2010, energysaving and production technologies in fact played a positive role in reducing implicitcarbon emissions in China. The energy savings effectively reduced3674.76Mt ofcarbon emission, which was approximately17.75%of the overall implicit carbonemission. Moreover, the study also demonstrated that the differences in China’s scalesof export and export structure promoted the growth carbon emissions, in which thescale of export plays a more major role, contributing approximately114.85%.