ABSTRACT
The issues of energy, environment and economics (3E) have become more and more important because the energy crises and environmental disasters have happened with increasing frequency, which has seriously affected stable economic growth in the world since the 1970s. To challenge this, the concepts of sustainable development and the low carbon economy have been proposed during the past two decades. In recent years, the increasingly powerful economic crisis has already destroyed the traditional growth model and now provides great opportunities for many countries, either developed or developing, to transform their economic growth model from high-carbon and extensive in nature to be low-carbon based, intensive and sustainable. For example, both the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the American Clean Energy and Security Act aim to develop renewable energy and low-carbon techniques and plan to make them a new economic driver. In 2009, the UK also released its white papers outlining national strategy, the Low Carbon Transition Plan, with targets to 2020. The topics of energy, environment and economic low-carbon transformation are more important and urgent in China. The basic fact is that China is the second largest economy in the world, just behind the US, but it has become the largest energy consumer and carbon emitter at the present time.
