Low-carbon knowledge is seen as having a key role in interfering with household energy consumption behaviors by wide consensus from political and academic areas. Whether low-carbon publicity will help to reduce household energy consumption is still in dispute. By constructing an integrated knowledge-intention-behavior model and using 1335 detailed survey questionnaires of household energy behavior in Henan Province, the central area in China, this paper finds that in the developing area low-carbon knowledge or publicity cannot positively impact household energy-saving behavior even if mediated by energy awareness and energy-saving attitudes. Low-carbon knowledge does improve energy-saving attitude and attitude does not decrease household energy consumption directly. Familiarity with particular energy-saving knowledge would decrease the household energy consumption but not significantly in the statistics. Path analysis unfolds the reason that the heterogeneous effects of purchase-based intention and habitual intention explain energy consumption behavior. Subgroup analysis supports those economic factors of income and energy prices play key roles in explaining such household energy consumption behavior in the rapid urbanization area. This paper gives new evidence on the residential energy-saving behavior intervention among developing areas.

Promoting green behavior among corporations is essential to the green transition of industrial sectors in China. There is a unique government-led green publicity institution, ‘Xuanguan‘, that expects to accelerate the green idea and policy spread top-down in the economic system in China. However, few studies discussed its role in formulating corporate green behavior. By constructing an integrated model of Government-led publicity-Internal and external perception-Corporate green behavior, this paper explored the effect of government-led green publicity on corporate green behavior, based on the survey data of 199 industrial manufacturing corporations in Henan Province, China. A structural equation model (SEM) was adopted to detect the influence and influential path. The results found that government-led green publicity could positively enhance green behavior via improving the corporate internal perception of risk and opportunity and improving the corporate perception of external environment actors. The heterogeneity tests showed that type of publicity channels, corporate ownership, and corporate scale made different effects on the results. Further analysis proved that government-led publicity could enhance the function of formal environmental regulation. It implies that government-led publicity can be a good compensation for formal regulations and stimulate green behavior. This paper demonstrates a new factor of enhancing corporate behavior and contributed new evidence of China’s green development story.

Quantitative analysis of the impact of digitalization on the energy, environment and economic comprehensive benefits of the energy Internet has important theoretical and practical value. Based on the perspective of industrial chain, this paper adopted the method of System Dynamics theory to describe the key role of digital technology investment in upstream energy production, midstream energy transmission and downstream energy consumption of the energy Internet industry. It identified digital technology investment and other key factors that affect the efficiency of the Energy Internet, clarified their feedback relationships. On this basis, it built a system dynamic model including energy producers, energy service provider and the end user subsystems to quantitatively simulate the comprehensive impacts of the Energy Internet industry under the change of the proportion of different types of digital technology investment. The simulation results show that digital technology investment plays a key role in improving the comprehensive benefits of the energy Internet; Under the scenario of high proportion of digital technology investment, it is estimated that by 2025, digital investment of energy internet will provide nearly 0.72 million jobs for Chinese society every year, and the installed capacity of clean energy power generation will increase to 1.76 billion kilowatts, which can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 5.7 billion tons in total. Increasing the proportion of digital technology investment can significantly improve the comprehensive benefits of the energy Internet and strongly support the development goals of China's 14th Five Year Plan.

In the face of the “ 3 0- 6 0” target, the task of carbon emission reduction in China is particularly arduous. Due to factors such as energy resource endowment and economic and industrial structure, there are large spatial differences in carbon emission levels among regions in China. As a representative region of t h e traditional energy industrial structure, the huge energy consumption of the industrial sector in the central region has caused a large amount of carbon emissions. Based on the MRIO model, this paper measures the embodied carbon emissions of trade and the amount of carbon emissions that the regions should bear in 2012 and 2017 for the eight major regions in China. We found that there is large difference in carbon emissions among the eight regions in China, with the central region ranking first in the country, and this difference is also manifested in the provinces of the central region. In addition, under the producer responsibility principle, the problem of carbon leakage between developed and less developed regions is becoming more prominent, with the central and western regions acting as a “ pollution haven” . Further, to rationalize the carbon emission responsibilities of each region, this paper proposes a shared responsibility scheme and compares it with the producer and consumer responsibility systems. This paper is of practical and theoretical reference significance for the scientific delineation of carbon emission reduction responsibilities and the effective promotion of the overall carbon peaking goal.