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Carbon neutrality is an important policy in the current global response to climate change and has been widely recognized by various industries. In the process of promoting carbon neutrality, new energy plays a pivotal role. In this study, the definition and connotation of new energy and its role and specific operation in the energy transition of carbon neutrality are firstly explained. Promoting new energy development requires significant green and low-carbon investments. Taking China as an example, this paper analyzes the opportunities brought by the carbon neutral process to the field of green finance and analyzes the main features and development trends of green finance in China at present. Then this paper proposes policy recommendations to strengthen the development of green finance in China in terms of improving the green financial policy system, enhancing the supply capacity of green financial services, and optimizing the supporting environment for green financial development. Finally, this paper analyzes the measures and experiences of the United States in promoting low-carbon development and proposes countermeasures for China's low-carbon development on the basis of the five major relationships that need attention in China's carbon-neutral process. That is, strengthen the top-level design and improve the regulatory policy system; optimize the energy structure and increase the proportion of clean energy; optimize the industrial structure and reduce energy consumption in key industries; build a complete low-carbon technology system and promote low-carbon technology research and development and demonstration applications, and encourage local conditions to explore low-carbon development paths. The development of green finance can contribute to the advancement of new energy technologies, thus contributing to the achievement of carbon neutrality goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the global greenhouse effect caused by excessive energy-related carbon emissions has attracted more and more attention. In this paper, we studied the dynamic evolution of factors driving China's energy-related CO2 emissions growth from 2007 to 2015 by using energy consumption method and input-output analysis and used the IO-SDA model to decompose the energy carbon emissions. Within the research interval, the results showed that (1) on the energy supply-side, the high carbon energy represented by raw coal was still the main factor to promote the growth of energy-related CO2 emissions. However, the optimization of energy consumption structure is conducive to reducing emissions. Specifically, the high carbon energy represented by raw coal exhibited a downward trend in promoting the increment of energy-related CO2 emissions, while the clean energy represented by natural gas showed an upward trend in promoting the increment of CO2 emissions. It is worth noting that there is still a lot of room for optimization of China's energy consumption structure to reduce emissions. (2) On the energy demand-side, the final demand effect is the main driving force of the growth of carbon emissions from fossil energy. Among them, the secondary industry plays a major role in the final demand effect. The "high carbonization" of the final product reflects the characteristics of China's high energy input in the process of industrialization. At the same time, since the carbon emission efficiency of the tertiary industry and the primary industry is better than that of the secondary industry, actively optimizing the industrial structure is conducive to slowing down the growth of carbon emission brought by the demand effect. (3) The input structure effect is the main restraining factor for the growth of energy carbon emissions, while the energy intensity effect has a slight driving effect on the growth of energy carbon emissions. The results show that China's "extensive" economic growth model has been effectively reversed, but the optimization of fossil energy utilization efficiency is still not obvious, and there is still a large space to curb carbon emissions by improving fossil energy utilization efficiency in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an extended Solow decomposition framework with a finite mixture model, which is incorporated to account for heterogeneous regimes. The model decomposes green economy into two different components, namely, green total factor productivity and factor endowment. Then, we reestimate the growth sources of green economy and especially the importance of energy consumption in China's provincial industries over 2000-2015. The empirical results suggest that there are three green growth regimes across Chinese provinces for overall economy and different industries. Specifically, some provinces switch regime over time, while the others maintain the same regime. Furthermore, when controlling for regime heterogeneity, the contribution of factor endowment decreases and that of green total factor productivity increases. With respect to energy consumption, traditional methods overestimate its importance in the primary and tertiary industries and underestimate that in the secondary industry. In addition, the reliance of China's overall economy and the secondary and tertiary industries on energy consumption decreases as economy develops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green growth has become an increasingly important paradigm for sustainable economic growth, resource development, and environmental protection. As the main focus in energy led green growth is a move away from fossil energy to clean energy, sustainable green growth resource development needs to measure both energy and environmental efficiencies. As the largest global energy consumer and carbon emitter, China has had to deal with serious energy and environmental issues in recent years, with its regional green growth performances being poorly assessed. Therefore, green growth clean energy-environmental efficiency assessments were examined in this paper, for which an integrated principal component analysis-data envelopment analysis based analysis approach was developed. It was found that while China's green growth has had a significant increasing trend in recent years, overall it was still at a low level, with the imbalances in China's regional economic development being reflected in its green growth. However, the excellent development and utilization of clean energy in most regions have significantly promoted a continuous improvement in China's green growth and the move toward sustainable resource development and utilization is contributing to long-term green growth. Green growth has also placed new demands on sustainable resource development in China. Therefore, underdeveloped regions that have sustainable resource endowments need to develop industrial systems that have clean energy as the main axis, and developed regions need to develop high-end industries that have low energy consumption and encourage mutual support systems between regions to ensure optimal sustainable resource, green growth development patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the downward pressure of the economy, China's extensive economic growth that relies on factor input is difficult to sustain. Scientific analysis of the industrial restructuring and energy consumption has become the key to realizing China's economic growth from high-speed to high-quality. Based on the fully-modified least square method and panel vector error correction model, this paper explores the equilibrium relationship and Granger causality among the industrial restructuring, energy consumption and economic growth at aggregated and disaggregated levels. The results show that: (1) The effect of industrial structure rationalization on economic growth is higher than that of industrial structure upgrading. When emphasizing industrial structure upgrade, the more reliable industrial policy to achieve China's sustainable economic growth is to pay attention to the industrial structure rationalization, especially in western China. (2) The impacts of natural gas and renewable energy consumption on economic growth are much smaller than coal and electricity consumption; more energy policies should be designed to encourage clean energy development. • The industrial structure rationalization has highest contribution to the economic growth of eastern China, followed by central and western China. • There exists unidirectional causality from industrial structure upgrading to structure rationalizing in western China and bidirectional causality between them in central China. • Effects of natural gas and renewable energy consumption on economic growth are much smaller than coal and electricity consumption. • Unidirectional long-term causality from renewable energy to economic growth exist in each sub-region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trade-off between economic growth and ecological improvement has always become an important and difficult issue for many countries, especially for developing countries. Due to a long-term extensive economic growth pattern, the regional resource allocation deviates from the optimal, especially the existence of energy misallocation, which hinders the maximization of economic output. Therefore, considering the characteristics and heterogeneity of resource endowments in different regions and increasing renewable energy consumption, that is, promoting energy transition, is it capable of sustainable development under China's actual conditions? The exploration of the issue is a core step in the research of the impact of renewable energy on industrial green transformation. Based on the panel data of 30 regions in China from 2009 to 2016, this paper constructs a threshold model from the perspective of regional energy misallocation and empirically tests the nonlinear mechanism of renewable energy consumption to promote industrial green transformation. The results show that China's energy allocation efficiency is low, there is a certain misallocation phenomenon, and the improvement effect in recent years is not satisfactory. Further, the relationship between renewable energy consumption and industrial green transformation is not a simple linear relationship, but a double threshold effect due to regional energy misallocation. In areas with severe energy misallocation, renewable energy consumption does not have a significant boost to industrial green transformation. Finally, this paper proposes the policy enlightenment of promoting industrial green transformation from the aspects of performance evaluation, market reform, and factor flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We measure the green growth degree of China's industrial sectors by considering the constraint of total energy consumption. • We proposed a new common equilibrium efficient frontier, which considers each DMU's own adjustment strategy on fixed-sum energy input. • The proposed approaches are applied to analyze the green growth and energy and environmental efficiency of 36 of China's industrial sectors. Tight energy constraints and severe environmental pollution are two main problems affecting economic growth and sustainable development. As an important economic growth mode, green growth seeks to achieve both economic growth and environmental sustainability. Previous studies on the efficiency evaluation of green growth ignored fixed-sum energy consumption; this is a significant omission because this constraint is general in China: the government has set targets to reduce energy consumption by 20% and 16% per unit of GDP during its the eleventh (2006-2010) and twelfth (2011-2015) five-year plans. To fill this gap, we propose a new data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to analyze the green growth degree of China's industrial sectors. The proposed DEA model considers the constraint of total energy consumption in order to conform to the policy of energy and emission reduction. Previous theoretical studies on fixed-sum output construct the common equilibrium efficient frontier (CEEF) only by considering the minimal reduction strategy for the fixed-sum output of all decision making units (DMUs), while ignoring each DMU's adjustment strategy for fixed-sum input/output. In this paper, we construct a new CEEF by considering each industrial sector's adjustment of energy consumption. The new CEEF not only guides the industrial sectors to alter their energy consumption structure to achieve green growth but also allows a more accurate evaluation of the energy and environmental efficiency (EEE) of industrial sectors. Last, our proposed model is applied to analyze the green growth and EEE of 36 of China's industrial sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]