ABSTRACT
Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... 236 References ...................................................................................................................................... 236
Since 1990s, issues of carbon footprint and global climate change have increasingly become major technological as well as important societal and political challenges, which are closely related to energy generation and use (Pierucci, 2009). Anthropocentric carbon footprint from traditional fossil-fuel energy consumption is one of the main causes of global warming. The strategies for greenhouse effect mitigation and carbon footprint reduction are very important for each country to combat climate change. To explore the impact of human activities on global carbon cycles, carbon footprint caused by economic development and energy consumption has become one of the major concerns in academic circles (Liu et al., 2002; Qi et al., 2004; Zhang, 2006; Zhu et al., 2009). Because the production value of heavy industries accounts for a large proportion of the total GDP, there is huge energy consumption in China during industrial activities. With rapid economic development, CO2 emission in China increased more than 73% from 1990 to 2003 to 17 million tons, and China has become the world’s second largest carbon emitter (International Energy Agency, 1996; Zou et al., 2009). Therefore, in the efforts to decrease CO2 emission, carbon emissions in China and their changes have become the focus of all countries across the world.
