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Abstract: As world's top two carbon emitters, driver analysis of China and the USA helped the governments to develop policies to cut or slow down carbon emission. Many studies identified the factors affecting carbon emission in China and the USA (emitting more than 40% of the global CO 2 emission), however, few studies considered stratified heterogeneity or the interactions of factors. Here, we adopted the modified Geographical Detector tool to investigate the main drivers of carbon emission from the perspective of stratified heterogeneity. The results of this analysis showed that human economic activities in China were the dominant effect of carbon emission changes, while energy intensity contributed toward controlling the carbon emission in China. Furthermore, population growth was the most significant driving force followed by energy intensity toward controlling the carbon emission of the USA. All these factors are mutually enhancing in changing carbon emissions, while oil share with energy intensity and coal share were more significantly enhanced in China's carbon emission than other interactions. The factors of human activities and energy mix posed a more powerful effect when they mutually enhanced each other to change carbon emission compared to other enhancing interactions. This work represents a pilot scheme for a carbon dioxide emission analysis from the categorical stratified heterogeneity based on statistical methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global climate change caused by carbon emissions poses a severe challenge to human economic and social development. The Chinese government has committed to a series of emission reduction initiatives to achieve carbon intensity targets by actively promoting the green transformation of the industrial sector—the main source of energy consumption and environmental pollution. This transformation has been ongoing for more than five years, and the effects, problems and experiences are worth discussing. Therefore, using province-level panel data for China's industry from 2010 to 2015, we systematically analyze the regional structure and developmental trend of industrial green transformation and empirically investigate its dynamic threshold effects on carbon intensity under different degrees of environmental regulation. The results show that China's industry has gradually undergone a green transformation, which has significantly reduced pollution emissions. However, the process has a large developmental scope due to regional heterogeneity and fluctuation characteristics. Interestingly, the impact of the industrial green transformation on carbon intensity is limited by the "critical mass" of environmental regulations. Paradoxically, weak environmental regulation significantly facilitates a decrease in carbon intensity through industrial green transformation. Once environmental regulation surpasses a critical level, the role of this transformation in CO 2 reduction is weakened, resulting in a failure to decrease carbon intensity. We provide insights into the driving factors that reduce carbon intensity and improve our understanding of the driving forces, paths and policy designs needed to successfully reach carbon intensity targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is one of the highest growth economies in the world, and it has experienced a significant rise in energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in recent decades. Its economic growth heavily depends on fossil fuels of coal and oil which led to huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions. This study logically analyzes the nexus of CO 2 emissions, economic growth and energy consumption (by decoupling greenhouse gas emission of CO 2 and economic growth) to provide more conclusive evidence on the phenomenon of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) over the period 1970–2015. To achieve the objective of consistency in the estimation results, the study applies different estimation techniques such as ARDL (Auto regressive Distributed Lag) model, FMOLS (Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares, DOLS (Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares), and impulse response and variance decomposition. In addition, ‘the business as usual' inverted U-shaped relationship between GDP per capita and an economy-related CO 2 emission is hypothesized. The result supports the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis from different techniques, the turning point hovers around $744665. The estimation result indicates that China EKC turning point shows some inconsistencies when compared to other turning points obtained from different studies. The inconsistency of the EKC turning point is attributed to the sensitivity of the result to different data source, variables selection, different pollutants and scope of the data. Although the EKC turning point of this present research differs from other China EKC turning points, it gives a clear policy roadmap on the pursuance of long run economic growth in favour of environmental quality. Besides, significance of the turning point lies with the need to explore other structural policies such as articulated demographic and energy policies rather than passively waiting for the arrival of the inflexion point. One interesting findings of the analysis is the consistency of the estimation results from the different estimation techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study incorporates demand emission sensitivity into a programming model to explore the issue of decoupling the lock-in effect between economic growth and CO 2 emissions through structure adjustment from a final demand perspective. As a demonstration, the proposed methodology is applied to data from China for the year 2012, the most relevant productive linkages and the most sensitive components of final demand in terms of CO 2 emissions were identified. The results indicate that to formulate better carbon mitigation policies, we should pay more attention to the main internal linkages in terms of CO 2 emissions within the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study estimates how carbon price affects diffusion of low carbon technologies using data collected from 60 iron & steel companies in China. The analysis indicates that the industry is familiar with related key energy saving and low carbon technologies and has made much progress in energy saving, but efforts in carbon management need improving. An average payback time threshold of 4.1 years was found as regards decision in invest in technology. The three target technologies were adopted by companies to different extents. Carbon emissions pricing was found to be ineffective in promoting the scale-up or further adoption of economically advantageous technologies such as dry top pressure recovery turbine (Dry TRT) and energy management centre (EMC) technology. A moderate carbon price for sintering waste heat recovery power generation (Sintering WHR), which has adoption potential in China's iron & steel industry, may generate comparatively significant effects for diffusion. This research sheds light on how diffusion of low carbon technologies would be affected and the consequences thereof on climate policy development for the target sector in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of new technologies and techniques for industrial carbon reduction has risen to prominence in contemporary engineering and economics studies, a trend triggered by rising levels of concern regarding climate change. Within this context, the scientific literature puts emphasis on energy topics and energy policy. Studies from the social science, economics and management science perspectives would benefit from a coherent and recognized taxonomy of the subthemes, a taxonomy that spans disciplines and guides studies of the carbon reduction and technology (CRT) debate in the various industrial sectors. This paper identifies and analyses the existing body of literature; it systematically reviews a set of 3310 scholarly contributions. The study also conducts a semantic social network analysis from that dataset's keywords, identifying promising core themes. Findings include the need for more management research in this field, the need for an interdisciplinary research agenda. We also observe a growing contribution of the Chinese academy to this complex and diversified debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]