The Possible Peak Path Of China’s Carbon Emissions

With global warming becoming more and more serious,it is imperative to reduce carbon emissions.China has made international commitments to peak its carbon emissions by around2030 and recently set a more difficult carbon-neutral target.However,current policies are not yet able to achieve the carbon emission peak and carbon neutral targets.Adjusting the structure of energy-intensive and heavy chemical industries is a significant way for China to transform its economic growth pattern and a vital policy strategy to peak carbon emissions.In the context of tackling climate change,it is essential to take into account economic growth and energy consumption in addition to carbon emission targets when making China’s development policies.Therefore,this paper embarked from the Economy-Energy-Environment system of China and constructed a Economy-Energy-Emission bi-level multi-objective optimization model based on the local closed input-output framework and the bi-level multi-objective feature.According to the possible development path of China,three scenarios(i.e.,economic priority,energy-saving priority,and emission-reduction priority)were simulated in this paper.The possible peak path of China’s carbon emissions was simulated by formulating each scenario’s industrial structure adjustment rules,and relative results were analyzed from different perspectives.The optimization results show that China’s carbon emissions can peak before 2030 through industrial structure adjustment.It is relatively easy to achieve China’s energy consumption,carbon emissions,and economic development goals between 2019 and 2030.The average GDP growth rates between 2019 and 2030 in three scenarios are between 5.56%-6.25%.On this basis,China’s carbon emissions could peak between 2022 and 2025 in the emission reduction priority scenario,and after that,carbon emissions would decline rapidly.In the energy-saving priority scenario,China’s carbon emissions could peak between 2023 and 2030,while the peak before 2030 failed in the economic-priority scenario.China’s energy structure adjustment trend is evident;the proportion of coal and oil decreases,and the proportions of natural gas and nonfossil energy increase.In terms of industrial structure,the proportions of primary and secondary industries decrease significantly,while the proportion of tertiary industry increases significantly(increases to 57.3-58.2 percent by 2030).The key to peak carbon emission through industrial structure adjustment is to control the development of some energy-intensity industries.Tilting the increment of the energy consumption and carbon emissions to the tertiary industry and hightech industries,reasonably governmenting the industrial structure upgrading,and promoting the development of the tertiary industry and high-tech industries can peak China’s carbon emissions as early as possible.