Revealing Inter-regional Environmental Inequities Hidden in China’s Energy Transition

Abstract

Energy transition is an important way to control air pollution, but it may conflict with the economic goal of alleviating regional inequality due to its inherently different cost burdens. As one of the effective measures of energy transition, this paper takes small coal-fired boiler (SCB) upgrading as an example to explore the regional mismatch between upgrading costs and health benefits. Here, we construct a boiler-level inventory of SCB upgrades for the North China Plain (NCP) during 2013−2017 and propose an integrated modeling framework to quantify the spatial contribution of economic costs and health benefits associated with SCB upgrading. We find that although the total health benefits could offset the total costs for the entire region, the developed municipalities (Beijing and Tianjin) are likely to gain more health benefits from less-developed neighboring provinces at lower costs. These developed municipalities contribute only 14% to the total health benefits but gain 21% of the benefits within their territories, 56% of which come from neighboring provinces. Their benefits are approximately 5.6 times their costs, which is much higher than the 1.5 benefit−cost ratio in neighboring provinces. Our findings may be useful in shaping more equitable and sound environmental policies in China or other regions of the world with serious coal-related air pollution.

Trifluoroacetic acid molecules confined into/onto metal–organic frameworks using H2btzip for efficiently improving proton conductivity using a synergistic effect

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6] In particular, solid-state proton conductors (SSPCs), as an important component of PEMFCs with broad applications from portable devices to vehicles, can trans-form chemical energy into electrical energy and have received significant attention. [7][8][9][10] Commercial Nafion membranes can achieve a high conductivity of 10 −1 -10 −2 S cm −1 , exhibit excellent chemical stability under mild conditions (98% RH and 60-80 °C), and have become the most widely used proton conducting materials in the market. [11][12][13][14] However, poor working conditions (e.g., high relative humidity and high temperature) and high production costs limit their widespread utilization.…”