About the Book
Climate Change, local air pollution, and energy security are three key issues in China’s energy sector. To address the aforementioned challenges, JianJun Tu applied CIMS, a technologically explicit and behaviourally realistic model to the most populous country. His research findings show that there are plausible energy development paths that would enable China to continue economic development while ensuring security of energy supply and acceptable local and global environmental quality. Advanced technologies have been identified as the key drivers to achieve ambitious emission control and energy security targets. In addition, this book reveals that while a carbon tax can effectively reduce both carbon and sulphur emissions, a sulphur tax is a policy instrument more specifically targeting local air quality. Furthermore, it is essential to understand the inevitable tradeoffs among different policy goals and the associated incremental costs. While a best case energy development path can be formulated to alleviate all three policy challenges, this path will be inevitably associated with substantial incremental costs, which imposes a challenge for China’s energy policy makers in years to come.