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Carbon emissions are rapidly increasing with continuing global economic development, necessitating an urgent energy revolution. Often, when calculating carbon footprint, analysts have failed to account for changes in capital stock and the impact of indirect emissions caused by the consumption of imported products. Furthermore, the homogenization of industrial and resident sectors has reduced our understanding of the specific driving forces behind carbon emissions. To avoid such locational and temporal biases, this study employs a dynamic input–output model to re-estimate the carbon footprint of only residents. We deconstruct residential emissions into different consumption categories and conduct a comparative analysis between developed and developing countries from across the world. To this end, data from 44 global economies were obtained from the World Input–Output Database for the period from 2000 to 2014. For developing countries, food consumption had the highest share of embodied carbon emissions, maintaining a share of over 20%, whereas in developed countries, housing consumption had the highest share, remaining at over 30%. In most countries, the consumption level and emission intensity effects were the most important drivers of carbon emission increases and carbon emission decreases, respectively. However, the contributions of the two varied considerably in different countries, with the maximum impact of the emission intensity effect on the carbon footprint of a single category reaching 854.31% in the US and 99.34% in China. These findings will help countries tailor their emission reduction policies to local conditions and emphasize that emission reductions should start by reducing the emission intensity and consumption structure of the corresponding sectors.

The electricity-focused input-output model is a popular approach for analysing the socio-economic and environmental impacts of electricity decarbonisation policies; however, it cannot be built directly owing to a lack of data on electricity technology. Here, we provide the Chinese electricity-focused input-output dataset, which characterises the production and distribution of 14 electricity subsectors. Based on the official input-output table for China in 2018, we disaggregate the original electricity sector by referring to macro data from statistics departments and our micro data on the unit-level cost information of China’s coal power. This is China’s most recent electricity-focused input-output dataset, featuring novel improvements in sub-electricity identification, especially mapping six detailed coal power sources and six alternative power sources. The Chinese electricity-focused input-output dataset can be used as the baseline for extensive satellite account compilation, allowing for a variety of in-depth studies on footprint analysis and policy simulations related to China’s electricity transition.

The global water resources network is simulated in the present work for the latest target year with statistical data available and with the most detailed data disaggregation. A top-down approach of systems inputoutput simulation is employed to track the embodied water flows associated with economic flows for the globalized economy in 2004. The numerical simulation provides a database of embodied water intensities for all economic commodities from 4928 producers, based on which the differences between direct and indirect water using efficiencies at the global scale are discussed. The direct and embodied water uses are analyzed at continental level. Besides, the commodity demand in terms of monetary expenditure and the water demand in terms of embodied water use are compared for the world as well as for three major water using regions, i.e., India, China, and the United States. Results show that food product contributes to a significant fraction for water demand, despite the value varies significantly with respect to the economic status of region.

The Chinese government intends to upgrade its current provincial carbon emission trading pilots to a nationwide scheme by 2015. This study investigates two of scenarios: separated provincial markets and a linked inter-provincial market. The carbon abatement effects of separated and linked markets are compared using two pilot provinces of Hubei and Guangdong based on a computable general equilibrium model termed Sino-TERMCo2. Simulation results show that the linked market can improve social welfare and reduce carbon emission intensity for the nation as well as for the Hubei-Guangdong bloc compared to the separated market. However, the combined system also distributes welfare more unevenly and thus increases social inequity. On the policy ground, the current results suggest that a well-constructed, nationwide carbon market complemented with adequate welfare transfer policies can be employed to replace the current top-down abatement target disaggregation practice.

Cities are the main material processors associated with industrialization. The development of urban production based on fossil fuels is the major contributor to the rise of greenhouse gas density, and to global warming. The concept of urban industrial structure optimization is considered to be a solution to urban sustainable development and global climate issues. Enforcing energy conservation and reducing carbon emissions are playing key roles in addressing these issues. As such, quantitative accounting and the evaluation of energy consumption and corresponding carbon emissions, which are by-products of urban production, are critical, in order to discover potential opportunities to save energy and to reduce emissions. Conventional evaluation indicators, such as “energy consumption per unit output value” and “emissions per unit output value”, are concerned with immediate consumptions and emissions; while the indirect consumptions and emissions that occur throughout the supply chain are ignored. This does not support the optimization of the overall urban industrial system. To present a systematic evaluation framework for cities, this study constructs new evaluation indicators, based on the concepts of “embodied energy” and “embodied carbon emissions”, which take both the immediate and indirect effects of energy consumption and emissions into account. Taking Beijing as a case, conventional evaluation indicators are compared with the newly constructed ones. Results show that the energy consumption and emissions of urban industries are represented better by the new indicators than by conventional indicators, and provide useful information for urban industrial structure optimization.

The uncanny valley effect has sparked interest in fields such as humanoid robotics and hyper-realistic virtual animation. Nonetheless, proof of its existence in artificial intelligence (AI) news anchors remains limited. This study examined the existence and effect of the uncanny valley in AI news anchors. Particularly, it delved into human perception and behavior during interactions with AI news anchors. Results showed that AI news anchors failed to establish emotional bonds with audiences, and thus fell within the uncanny valley. Audiences were sensitive to minor defects and oddities in the AI news anchors, and felt eerie while watching them. Findings of this study can be used to formulate guidelines for the design of the appearance and behavior of not only AI news anchors but all humanoid AI characters.

Methanol fuel engines can effectively reduce emissions of carbon monoxide and particulate matter, but they cause a substantial increase in emissions of unregulated pollutants like methanol and formaldehyde. In this study, Ag/CeO2 catalysts were prepared from metal–organic framework (MOF) and silver acetate precursors using different methods and applied to the deep oxidation of methanol. The influence of preparation conditions on the types of active oxygen, surface chemical state, and oxygen vacancies was revealed by changing the calcination conditions and compared with the Ag/CeO2 catalyst prepared by traditional methods. At the same time, the low-temperature reaction pathway of methanol was explored. The results showed that calcination conditions greatly affected the structure of the catalyst. Among them, Ag/CeO2-A500 obtained by calcining Ag/Ce BTC in air at 500 °C had the best catalytic performance for methanol oxidation. The surface chemical state, overall oxygen vacancies, and the proportion of metallic silver may be key factors for its superior catalytic performance.

The spray characteristics of liquid ammonia under various ambient pressures and temperatures were analyzed in a constant volume chamber to cover a wide range of superheat degrees. The injection pressure was set as 70 and 80 MPa with ambient pressure ranging from 0.2 to 4 MPa. The ambient temperature was 500 K. The results showed that the higher the injection pressure, the greater the kinetic energy obtained. The droplet fragmentation was enhanced, and the phenomenon of gradual separation of the gas–liquid region occurred with increasing injection pressure. Under flash boiling spray conditions, the spray developed faster than non-flash boiling and transition flash boiling spray under the same injection pressure. In addition, the flash boiling spray tip penetration of the gas and liquid increased more than that of cold spray, and the fluctuation of the late stage of the injection was relatively large. Therefore, the injection pressure has a greater effect on the spray tip penetration of flash boiling spray. Moreover, ambient pressure greatly influences the flare flash boiling spray. The spray resistance phenomenon was found during the spray development in the flare flash boiling condition. With the increase in ambient pressure, the spray tip penetration of flash boiling spray decreases due to the reduction in the pressure difference inside and outside the spray hole and the restriction of ambient gas. Meanwhile, owing to the low ambient pressure and ambient density, the liquid penetration in the initial phase of the flare flash boiling spray will be abnormally shorter than that of the non-flash boiling spray.

To provide support for the energy subsidy reform as a critical step of China's recent energy reform agenda, a comprehensive energy subsidy inventory of China is compiled and the associated distributional effect is investigated in this study. According to the results, the lower boundary estimation of annual energy subsidies of China was 90–202 billion CNY, equivalent to 0.22%–0.37% of GDP or 0.95%–1.21% of government expenditure, during 2010–2014. Thanks to the specific subsidies provided to rural grid construction and transportation, 72% of the energy subsidies were distributed to residents in 2012, while fixed capital and export carried another 13% and 10%. Poorer urban household received higher energy subsidy ratio through dwelling and food expenditures, but lower ratio through transportation and communication expenditures. The overall energy subsidies are slightly regressive, thus adequate reform can narrow wealth gap on the one hand and reduce budgetary pressure on the other.

The present study proposes a hierarchical wide-area decentralized coordinated control framework for HVDC power system that is robust to multiple operating conditions. The upper level wide-area coordinated controller is designed in the form of dynamic output feedback control that coordinates the lower level HVDC supplementary controller, PSS, and SVC. In order to enhance the robustness of the designed controller under various operating conditions, the polytopic model is introduced such that the closed-loop control system can be operated under strong damping mode in virtue of the stability criterion based on damping ratio. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed controller design algorithm is capable of enhancing the system damping over four different conditions.