Scenarios Analysis of the Energies’ Consumption and Carbon Emissions in China Based on a Dynamic CGE Model

This paper investigates the development trends and variation characteristics of China’s economy, energy consumption and carbon emissions from 2007 to 2030, and the impacts on China’s economic growth, energy consumption, and carbon emissions under the carbon tax policy scenarios, based on the dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. The results show that during the simulation period, China’s economy will keep a relatively high growth rate, but the growth rate will slow down under the benchmark scenario. The energy consumption intensity and the carbon emissions intensity per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will continually decrease. The energy consumption structure and industrial structure will gradually optimize. With the economic growth, the total energy consumption will constantly increase, and the carbon dioxide emissions are still large, and the situation of energy-saving and emission-reduction is still serious. The carbon tax is very important for energy-saving and emission-reduction and energy consumption structure optimization, and the effect of the carbon tax on GDP is small. If the carbon tax could be levied and the enterprise income tax could be reduced at the same time, the dual goals of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions and increasing the GDP growth can be achieved. Improving the technical progress level of clean power while implementing a carbon tax policy is very meaningful to optimize energy consumption structure and reduce the carbon emissions, but it has some offsetting effect to reduce energy consumption. OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2014, 6 488