A Study on China’s Energy Policy: Focusing on Sustainable Development and Environmental Protection

Abstract

China’s energy industry has developed very well in the past 50 years following the establishment of new economic policies. With the evolution of China’s energy policy, there have also been tremendous problems that are worthy of research. Along with the reinforcement of the status of China’s energy industry over these years, there have been several studies on the history of the development of China’s energy industry. However, while most of them have emphasized the development and construction of the energy industry, research that focuses on the relations between energy and environment and sustainable development is still lacking. This paper focuses on this innovative topic, which has gained much attention recently, and discusses the relations between energy policy and sustainable development and environment protection. In addition, it provides some constructive advice that will contribute to future energy policymaking based on environment protection and sustainable development. The general trend of China’s energy policy development will be focused on renewable energy. However, at the same time, China will still make efforts to make fossil fuels cleaner because China cannot get rid of them owing to the high-speed development of its economy. Coal is irreplaceable in the next few decades, if China wants to maintain its leading position in the world according to economic growth rate. Thus, in the last chapter, I gave some recommendations that China should develop the relative LCE dominated by coal and complete energy market mechanisms, increase green energy consumption. Despite strong political and financial commitments to energy-efficiency improvement by the government, several issues are still present in China indicating that the country needs to develop more effective policy mechanisms and sufficient institutional capacity necessary to create long-lasting impacts on energy-efficiency investments.