Environmental economic co-benefits and offsets effects of China's unified energy-carbon market.

China pushed for the unification of markets for natural resources and emissions, wherein initial allocation mechanisms have a significant impact on how well the market functions. To identify how the market works well, this paper builds an integrated framework, comprised of permits initialization and reallocation processes. Additionally, we simulate variables by 2030 through scenario analysis and machine learning methods. At the unified energy-carbon market, GDP could increase by more than 49%, while the total energy consumption and the total carbon emission increase by around 410 million tons and 711 million tons, respectively, in China. This illustrates how joint trading markets favor economic growth and emission reduction simultaneously. Besides, most of China's provinces obtain improved energy consumption and carbon emission intensities, which proves the effectiveness and importance of the unified market. However, two rebound effects are found, one is that the increased investment is not always promoting positive effects, and the other is that provinces with higher GDPs have less incentive to cut their energy use. Further, the accumulated per capita initialization type favors energy conservation, while per GDP initialization benefits economic growth and carbon reduction. It's needed that simultaneously constructing an economic and efficient incentive mechanism while effectively playing up the government's role.