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Abstract Time is an absolutely scarce resource for humans. Considering the fact that people consume goods and services to fulfill their daily activities in 24 hours a day, a new perspective based on time use might be more intuitive for understanding why and how people allocate their time and consumption to different activities, and what the energy demand and emissions will be in the future when time-use patterns shift. Accordingly, the policy implications for reducing carbon dioxide emissions could be extended to more fundamental dimensions related to people's activity structures, activity duration, and consumption patterns of activities. This study attempts to transform the energy and emissions problems into a finite time-use problem, by investigating the change of energy consumption and emissions building on a time-use-based approach. To that end, we take China as the empirical context, and investigate potential time-use patterns for Chinese residents. Scenario analyses assuming that Chinese residents may shift to time-use patterns in developed countries are further conducted to give a general picture of future carbon dioxide emissions and meanwhile to explore a low-carbon time-use pattern for Chinese residents. We find that, a potential Chinese residents' low-emissions route may involve shifting to the activity patterns of American residents and the hybrid consumption patterns of activities composed of patterns found in Finland, Japan and UK. And six main time-use activities, including Travel , Personal care , Repairs, Gardening and Pet care , Sleep and Rest , Eating and Drinking , and Recreation and Leisure , will make a greater contribution to increasing daily emissions from residents if they shift their time-use patterns in the future. Highlights • A time-use based approach to carbon emissions accounting is proposed. • Impact of change in non-work time on carbon emissions are investigated. • Carbon intensities of various time-use activities are estimated for 7 countries. • Daily carbon emissions per capita are evaluated with changes in time-use patterns. • Suitable time-use pattern for achieving a low-carbon society in China is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Spatial heterogeneous impacts of households on CO 2 emissions are analyzed. • Clarify the responsibility of CO 2 emissions reduction in Chinese provinces. • Unequal impacts on CO 2 emissions among different income households are identified. • The Chinese provinces demanding high-income household specific policies are listed. • Key sectors for shrinking unequal impacts of households on emissions are identified. Abstract As unequal carbon dioxide emissions exist among households with diverse consumption patterns resulting from different income and spatial contexts, the same carbon emission reduction policies for households will go against the principle of social equality. Though a lot of attention has been paid to estimating the emissions from different income households in previous literature, the full impacts of households on carbon emissions of production sectors through changing income are not well captured. Therefore, for better supporting the fair but different carbon emission reduction policy design for households and provinces, this paper investigates the unequal impacts of households on total emissions and sectoral emissions by specifically taking into account the heterogeneity among different income households in different provinces under the empirical context of China. A combination of semi-closed input-output model and hypothetical extraction method is used here to quantify the unique effect of each income class of households. We find five aspects of seriously unequal impacts of different income households among Chinese provinces: (1) the more responsibility for reducing carbon emissions should be allocated to Shandong, Hebei, Jiangsu, Inner Mongolia, Henan, Guangdong, Shanxi and Liaoning; (2) more unequal impacts on total provincial emissions between urban and rural households in Beijing, Tianjin, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Chongqing; (3) unequal impacts of urban (or rural) households on total provincial emissions exist among provinces; (4) unequal impacts of households on total provincial emissions exist among income classes and among provinces; (5) unequal impacts of urban households on emissions of sectors exist among provinces. These pictures of the inequality can provide more evidence for making fair but distinguishing carbon emission reduction policies for different income households across Chinese provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting electric vehicles (EVs) is an important measure to ensure energy security, improve air quality, and mitigate global climate change. However, the emission reduction impacts of EVs in China have been widely debated and the conclusions of existing studies are still controversial. In this study, we adopted the life cycle assessment (LCA) method to evaluate the carbon dioxide (CO 2) and air pollutant emissions from the stage of vehicle production, vehicle use and vehicle end-of-life. We further compared the emissions of three types of passenger vehicles in China, including internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), and battery electric vehicle (BEV). Compared with ICEV, BEV and PHEV were found to reduce the emissions of CO 2 , VOCs, and NO X , but increase the emissions of PM 2.5 and SO 2. These differences were primarily caused by EV's high fuel efficiency and high fuel consumption of ICEV. Additional findings indicate that the emissions of PM 2.5 and SO 2 of BEV were 2.6 and 2.1 times that of ICEV, respectively; and the emissions of PM 2.5 and SO 2 of PHEV were 1.8 and 1.5 times that of ICEV, respectively. Moreover, we found the emissions of PM 2.5 and SO 2 of EV will be higher than that of ICEV in high renewable energy scenario with higher biomass share if keeping the emission factor of electricity constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]