CO2 Emission Reduction Impacts of Promoting Energy-Saving and New Energy Vehicles in China

The rapid growth of the auto industry is a major challenge to reduce CO₂ emissions in China. Promoting energy-saving" & new energy vehicles should be effective to tackle the issue. This paper aims to evaluate impacts of such promotion on CO₂ emission reduction. Scenario analysis method and the Gompertz model are adopted to simulate future auto market scale and structure. Possible emission reduction effects from promotion in 4 distinct scenarios are estimated based on Life Cycle Analysis and Tier 3 method of the IPCC guidelines. We find that the market scale will be 169-213 million in 2015 and 241-350 million in 2020, the market share of energy-saving" & new energy vehicles will be 1.9-2.3 times higher with effective promotion, 86.7-147.1 million tons of CO₂ emissions may be reduced (15.2%-19.6% of CO₂ emissions by vehicles in 2015), and the amount will increase to 153.1-250.9 million tons with the ratio rising to 15.3%-26.0% in 2020.