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The report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China mentioned that China is facing tightening resource and environmental constraints, environmental pollution, and other issues, and the energy-consuming right trading policy is a key measure to promote green, circular, and low-carbon development in China. Under the dual consideration of ecological benefits and economic benefits, this paper took the pilot launch of energy-consuming trading as a quasi-natural experiment and used panel data from 31 provinces in China from 2009 to 2020 and the different-in-differences method to explore the impact of this policy on the optimization and upgrading of China's industrial structure. The study showed that: (J) The energy-consuming right trading policy could promote the optimization and upgrading of the industrial structure, and the promotion effect on the upgrading of the industrial structure outweighed its adverse impact on the rationalization of the industrial structure, as evidenced by a series of robustness tests. © The mechanism analysis showed that the realization paths of industrial structure upgrading were the upgrading of technological innovation and that of energy consumption structure, and the policy suppressed the adverse impact on the rationalization of industrial structure by improving the input structure and output structure of some industrial sectors. © In addition, the pilot policy of energy-consuming rights had obvious regional heterogeneity for the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure, which significantly promoted the upgrading of industrial structure in the central and western regions and the rationalization of industrial structure in the eastern regions. This study provides some policy references for the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure from the perspective of improving the energy-consuming right trading market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]