Research on the impact of industrial structure upgrading on China’s carbon emissions: Mechanism and test

Inspired by biomechanics, studying the relationship between industrial structure upgrading and carbon emissions and the specific impact paths is of great practical significance to the coordinated development of China’s environment and economy. Biomechanics, with its in-depth understanding of the interaction and energy-efficiency principles in natural systems, provides a novel perspective for this study. This paper selected the panel data of 30 provincial administrative regions from 2001 to 2020. Inspired by the concepts of biophysical economics, which are closely related to the energy-matter flow principles in biomechanics, a two-way fixed-effect model of carbon emissions was employed to empirically analyze the relationship between industrial structure upgrading and carbon emissions. Just as biomechanics analyzes the most efficient movement patterns in organisms to minimize energy consumption, this model aims to find the most efficient industrial structure patterns to reduce carbon emissions. The conclusions show that: (1) Industrial structure upgrading can effectively reduce carbon emissions; (2) due to the differences in the economic development levels of different regions, the intensity of industrial structure upgrading on carbon emissions is different. Among them, the effect on the eastern region is the most obvious, followed by the central region, while the effect on the western region and the northeast region is not obvious. (3) Through the mediation effect model, it is found that technological innovation and labor quality improvement are effective ways to upgrade the industrial structure and reduce carbon emissions. Finally, this paper analyzes carbon emission treatment technologies from the direction of biodegradation, which has attracted wide attention due to its environmental friendliness. In biomechanics, natural degradation processes in organisms provide inspiration for human-made biodegradation technologies. Based on biomechanics, six major disposal technologies are compared and analyzed from three aspects: Indirect carbon emissions from operation energy consumption, direct carbon emissions from plastic decomposition and carbon compensation for resource recovery. This paper provides a reference for the selection of waste biodegradation disposal technology from the perspective of helping “double carbon” goal, by drawing on the energy-efficient and sustainable principles from biomechanics.