The impact of China’s carbon emissions trading system on energy justice

Energy justice has become one of the global concerns, and carbon emissions trading system (CETS) is likely to have an impact on energy transition and energy justice therein. Therefore, this paper proposes the indicators for energy justice, and then develops a spatial difference-in-differences model to reveal the impact mechanism of China’s CETS on energy justice. The results indicate that China’s CETS does not cause injustice in cost distribution but in benefit distribution in and only in pilot regions. Specifically, China’s CETS has significantly reduced CO₂ emissions by an average of 95.0 million tons in the pilot regions but significantly exacerbated the urban-rural electricity consumption inequality in pilot regions from 2011 to 2021. Meanwhile, China’s CETS has no significant impact on energy justice in neighboring regions of pilots. Further analysis shows that promoting technological innovation and government intervention can ease this distributional injustice of benefits.