Despite the remarkable achievements of economic development in the past three decades since the reform and opening up in the late 1970s, criticisms and suspicions have been recently looming over the sustainability of China’s neck-breaking growth.1 Currently, the increasing inequality in development between urban and rural areas and deteriorating environmental quality have become the main barriers to China’s sustainable development.2 Due to the dualistic economic structure and the specific tax and fiscal policies that favored the development of urban areas, the huge gap in development between urban and rural areas has long been a problem in China (e.g., [89,94]. As shown in Fig. 1, since 2002, the ratio of China’s urban-rural residential income has been consistently over 3.0. Particularly, in 2009, this ratio achieved its highest level of 3.33. In recent years, the urban-rural income gap has slightly narrowed, although the level remained high at 3.03 in 2013. Among China’s three main regions (east, center and west), the urban-rural income disparity is lowest in the prosperous eastern region while largest in the relatively less developed western region. Partly because of the accelerated industrialization, urbanization and rapid economic growth, in recent years, China’s consumption of fossil energy surged (e.g., [47,102]. The impact of urbanization and migration may significantly affect energy consumption and carbon emissions, and therefore bring pressure to the energy system [57,97]. Consequently, China’s CO2 emissions ballooned, which garnered the increasing focus of the international community as global warming has become a growing threat to the world. In recent years, due to the improvement of production efficiency, China’s carbon dioxide intensity (i.e., CO2 emissions per unit of GDP) has been dramatically decreased. However, the total amount of CO2 emissions continues to soar. In 2009, to promote energy conservation and emission reduction, the State Council of China, for the first time, formulated carbon emission reduction targets; by 2020, China’s carbon intensity (CO2 emissions per unit of GDP) is set to be decreased by 40%e45% of the 2005 level. Since then, China has announced a series of ambitious goals to curb CO2 emissions. Before the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, China vowed to peak total CO2 emissions by 2030, and the carbon intensity is expected to be decreased by 60%e65% in 2030 compared with the level of 2005. Therefore, the ensuing 10e15 years are a critical period for China to accomplish its goals in constraining CO2 emissions and enhancing green development.