An impact assessment of energy undesirable output on climate-carrying capacity: a case study of Shanghai

It is important to evaluate the impact of undesirable energy output on the climate-carrying capacity of the power grid-based economy to promote the green development. Three indicators—climate natural capacity, urban climate pressure, and urban coordinated development capacity—are used as input factors to study the climate-carrying capacity. The Nemerow index method and comprehensive evaluation method based on entropy weight are employed to calculate inputs. Pollution emissions such as carbon dioxide emissions, waste gas, wastewater, and solid waste pollution are included as energy undesirable outputs, and industry output value is included as a desirable output to calculate the non-radial directional distance of the output of climate-carrying capacity that combines desirable and undesirable outputs. The total factor non-radial directional distance function and energy-environmental non-radial directional distance function are used to obtain the efficiency index of total factor climate-carrying capacity and the efficiency of climate-carrying capacity performance, respectively. These two indices are included in the analysis to estimate the impact of energy undesirable output on climate-carrying capacity. Results from empirical analysis showed that when two types of undesirable outputs, namely waste gas and wastewater outputs, in Shanghai are constrained, the efficiency and performance efficiency of climate environmental carrying capacity are both lower than 0.8, indicating that undesirable outputs had a substantial influence on the climate-carrying capacity. In Shanghai, the major approach to improve the regional climate-carrying capacity is to improve energy efficiency and reduce undesirable outputs of power grid-based economy.