原文题目：Can expanding natural gas consumption reduce China's CO2 emissions?
原文作者：Bin Xu, Boqiang Lin
一作单位：School of Statistics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330013, PR China.
期刊名：Energy Economics
期刊月份： 2019.6
关键词：天然气消费量，二氧化碳排放，非参数加性回归模型


AbstractChina is now the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), thus leading to China facing enormous pressure on CO2 emission reduction. Natural gas is a high thermal and low-emission energy. Expanding natural gas consumption cannot only meet the growing demand for energy consumption but also optimize energy consumption structure. Therefore, many scholars have investigated the effect of natural gas consumption on CO2 emissions. However, ignoring a large number of nonlinear relationships between economic variables, the vast majority of existing studies use traditional linear models to explore the relationships between natural gas consumption and CO2 emissions. In order to make up for the gap in existing research, this paper uses the nonparametric additive regression model with data-driven features to investigate the relationships between the two. The results show that natural gas consumption has an inverted “U-shaped” nonlinear effect on CO2 emissions in the eastern region, but a positive “U-shaped” nonlinear effect in the central and western regions. The linear impact of natural gas consumption on CO2 emissions in the eastern and central regions is higher than that in the western region, due to the differences in resource availability and energy prices, as well as natural gas consumption. Therefore, during the process of promoting natural gas consumption, the central and local governments should adopt heterogeneous measures at different stages of development.

    中国是世界上最大的能源消费国和二氧化碳排放国，2016年，中国的能源消耗和二氧化碳排放分别达到43.6亿吨标准煤和117.7亿吨。为了应对减缓二氧化碳排放的挑战，中国采取了一系列措施，例如开发可再生能源，鼓励节能减排技术的研发等。然而，现阶段可再生能源的规模仍然很小，无法在能源供给中扮演重要角色，而与煤炭、石油相比，天然气的碳强度要低得多，因此有望成为短期减缓碳排放强度的重要能源。中国政府已采取“西气东输”等相关措施，扩大天然气进口，增加天然气的供给。

    目前，许多学者研究了天然气消费对于二氧化碳排放的影响，然而，绝大多数现有研究使用传统线性模型来探索二者的关系，忽略了变量之间的大量非线性关系。为了弥补现有研究的差距，本文采用了非参数可加回归模型（nonparametric additive regression model），并考虑了数据驱动特征。结果表明，天然气消费对东部地区的二氧化碳排放具有倒“U”形非线性效应，但在中西部地区具有正“U”形非线性效应。由于资源可用性、能源价格以及天然气消费的差异，天然气消费对于中部和东部地区的碳排放影响要高于西部地区。  

转自公众号《3E论文速递》