Introduction

Climate change is exerting far-reaching impacts around the world, and it should be the most expensive environmental crisis that has ever been encountered by humankind. China, as the largest CO₂-emitting country, is a crucial stakeholder in climate change. In 2020, its residential sector alone has emitted well more than one billion tons of CO₂, ranking as the fifth largest emitter among countries after China itself, United States, India and Russia, and ahead of Japan. Its rise in residential electricity consumption has been even more drastic, rising by nearly seventy fold from merely 11 kWh in 1980 to 115 kWh in 2000 and 761 kWh in 2019. This book, therefore, focuses on Chinese residential electricity consumption to examine on its contribution to overall energy consumption and CO₂ emissions in China and the world.

Residential CO₂ emissions in this book are understood from the perspective of time-use lifestyle. This chapter reviews academic literature on the conventional consumer lifestyle approach and the emerging time-use approach. Time-use has been a mature research field largely in sociology. The worldwide availability of the time-use survey data makes it a great alternative in investigating residential CO₂ emissions than the consumer lifestyle approach. This chapter overviews the development of time-use surveys and how it has been adopted in energy studies. The data and methodology difficulties that account for the underdevelopment of this niche field in China and the world will be examined and explained.