Economy and carbon dioxide emissions effects of energy structures in China: Evidence based on a novel AHP-SBMDEA model

With the completion of the poverty alleviation task in China, the Chinese economy has made great break-throughs. Meanwhile, the implementation of Chinese "dual carbon" goal has entered an important window period of both strategic opportunities and difficulties. The emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) leads to the greenhouse effect, which affects the sustainable development of society. Therefore, this paper proposes an improved analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with Slacks-based measure integrating data envelopment analysis (SBMDEA) (AHP-SBMDEA) based efficiency evaluation model for different provincial-level administrative regions in China, which is used to analyze and optimize the Chinese energy structure of different provincial-level administrative regions. With coal, gasoline, petroleum, fuel oil, diesel, crude oil and natural gas as inputs, the per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the desired output and the CO2 as the undesired output, after linear weighted calculation of the results of the AHP-SP model and the SBMDEA model, the energy efficiency evaluation model of different pro-vincial administrative regions in China is established. The results show that there is a large difference in effi-ciency between Chinese northern and southern regions, and the overall efficiency of southern regions is higher than that of northern regions. In addition, it is easier to find out the optimal energy efficiency benchmark, which can provide suggestions and help to guide the energy consumption input structure improvement of other inef-ficient provincial-level administrative regions. Furthermore, the energy structure can also be adjusted through the redundant variable calculated by the SBMDEA model. For example, Sichuan Province can reduce the con-sumption of the coal, the gasoline, the diesel, the fuel oil, the crude oil and the natural gas by 5269.95 x10000 tons (WT), 513.01 WT, 59.05 WT, 34.37 WT, 4,73.33 WT and 130.37 billion cubic meters (BCM), respectively. Its CO2 emissions can be reduced by 1925.4 WT, and raise the efficiency of energy utilization in the province.