Abstract
Reducing energy intensity is conducive to the sustainable use of non-renewable fossil energy, and is also one of the main strategies to deal with climate change and environmental degradation. The effect of national macro-level factors on energy intensity has been basically confirmed, but the effect of regional low-carbon policy remains to be investigated. Based on this, our analysis exploits China’s “low-carbon city pilot” policy as a quasi-natural experiment and conducts the difference-in-difference resign. We collect the panel data of 271 cities in China from 2006 to 2016. The empirical results show that: first, the low-carbon city pilot policy can effectively reduce the energy intensity. Second, there exist heterogeneous effects on energy intensity among different cities, and the inhibition effects in eastern cities, high economic development cites, and non-old industrial-base cities are more significant. Third, the policy mainly affects regional energy intensity through technological innovation rather than industrial structure optimization mechanism.
Highlights
Energy intensity relates to the sustainable utilization of non-renewable resources such as fossil energy
The results show that China’s low-carbon city pilot policy has reduced energy intensity remarkably
Our results show that the “low-carbon city pilot” policy can reduce the energy intensity by promoting green technology innovation rather than industrial structure optimization
Summary
Energy intensity relates to the sustainable utilization of non-renewable resources such as fossil energy. This further confirms previous conclusions that with fiercer industrial competition and higher professional R&D departments, enterprises in economically developed regions are able to respond quickly once policies introduced, which in turn bring down energy intensity even more. The coefficients of the interaction terms in column 1 and column 2 are −0.6615, and −0.8295, respectively, and both pass the 1% significance test It shows that after changing the research period, the low-carbon city pilot policy still have a significant inhibitory effect on energy intensity. We performed the Sobel test, and the test result is not significant, indicating that the mediating effect does not exist
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