Does Environmental Regulation Affect Natural Gas Consumption? Evidence from China with Spatial Insights
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
-This paper is methodologically robust but theoretical part on the selection of environmental policy instruments is lacking. So, in its 2. Literature Review section, it is recommended to review and cite the relevant literature on policy tool choice in environmental policy (for example, Lee, J. H., & Lim, S. (2018) “The Selection of Compact City Policy Instruments and Their Effects on Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Transportation Sector: The Case of South Korea,” Sustainable Cities and Society. 37: 116-124.).
-In Figure 5, one province seems to belong to both HH and LL. This reviewer is curious about whether it is just mistakenly drawn or affected the following analysis shown in Table 4.
Author Response
Thank you for your valuable comments on the manuscripts. We revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments, and carefully proof-read the manuscript to correct typographical, grammatical and bibliographical errors. Here below the point-to-point responses to the comments are provided.
1 The reviewer’s comment: This paper is methodologically robust but theoretical part on the selection of environmental policy instruments is lacking. So, in its 2. Literature Review section, it is recommended to review and cite the relevant literature on policy tool choice in environmental policy (for example, Lee, J. H., & Lim, S. (2018) “The Selection of Compact City Policy Instruments and Their Effects on Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Transportation Sector: The Case of South Korea,” Sustainable Cities and Society. 37: 116-124.).
Answer: Thank you for pointing this out. The proposed framework on the manuscript focuses on the impact of environmental regulation on China’ natural gas consumption and its influence path, not on the impact of typical policy tools. The reviewer ’s comment provides us with a good direction for deepening future research. Therefore, we have added a discussion on the impact of China's major environmental policy tools on natural gas consumption under the proposed mechanism framework (Line 404-513).
2 The reviewer’s comment: In Figure 5, one province seems to belong to both HH and LL. This reviewer is curious about whether it is just mistakenly drawn or affected the following analysis shown in Table 4.
Answer: Thank you for pointing this out. This is a drawing error. Shaanxi province belongs to HH region. We have revised Figure 5 by deleting it in Figure 5b. Drawing errors do not affect the following analysis shown in Table 4.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
1. I suggest that the text passes through a native English proofreader.
2. Improve the wording of the introduction.
3. Observe the keywords. When written in a sophisticated manner that does not mirror the text, they make it difficult to search the article using metadata.
4. Could not understand the effects of taxation on the model. Do rates have consequences when they increase the installation of pipelines? Is there a time forecast in the model, when there is government investment?
5 The data are restricted to the year 2017 (Fig. 6). As all the information is available online, since this work is based on public data collection, I suggest that the authors extend the time frame, at least until 2019.
6. Can the model be replicated to countries whose taxation is different from a communist republic, where tax is not government-dependent, but multi-party, with influences from various diffuse interests?
7. Was it purposeful to leave the question of the implication of gas on air pollution, differently from what other authors (cited in the paper) did?
Author Response
Thank you for your valuable comments on the manuscripts. We revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments, and carefully proof-read the manuscript to correct typographical, grammatical and bibliographical errors. Here below is the point-to-point responses to the comments.
1.The reviewer’s comment: I suggest that the text passes through a native English proofreader.
Answer: Thank you for pointing this out. The paper has been carefully revised by a native English speaker to improve the grammar and readability.
2.The reviewer’s comment: Improve the wording of the introduction.
Answer: Thanks for your kind advice. We revised the introduction in line 29-67.
3.The reviewer’s comment: Observe the keywords. When written in a sophisticated manner that does not mirror the text, they make it difficult to search the article using metadata.
Answer: Thank you for pointing this out. We modified the keywords to natural gas consumption; environmental regulation; government competition; influence mechanism (Line 26-27).
4.The reviewer’s comment: Could not understand the effects of taxation on the model. Do rates have consequences when they increase the installation of pipelines? Is there a time forecast in the model, when there is government investment?
Answer: Thank you for pointing this out. The aim of this paper is to reveal the influence of provincial environmental regulation on natural gas consumption and its influence mechanism, rather than specific measure. There is no variable referring to taxation in the model. In our previous manuscript, we discussed specific environmental measures too much in the results section (such as pollution tax and policy on total coal consumption control), which is really easy to cause misunderstanding. To highlight the outstanding issues of this article and to avoid misunderstanding, we added a discussion section, and summarized the impact of China's major environmental policy tools on natural gas consumption under the mentioned mechanism (Line 414-513).
The model is more suitable for explaining the causes than for forecasting, so we have not made any time forecast simulations.
5.The reviewer’s comment: The data are restricted to the year 2017 (Fig. 6). As all the information is available online, since this work is based on public data collection, I suggest that the authors extend the time frame, at least until 2019.
Answer: Thank you for pointing this out. We updated the data to 2018 in Fig. 6 (Line 511-513). Since the data used in Figure 6 are all derived from the China Statistical Yearbook, and the 2020 edition (which contains data for 2019) has not yet been issued.
6.The reviewer’s comment: Can the model be replicated to countries whose taxation is different from a communist republic, where tax is not government-dependent, but multi-party, with influences from various diffuse interests?
Answer: Thank you for this valuable feedback. Our model can be applied to measure the path of environmental regulation affecting natural gas consumption in other countries with different systems you mentioned. But the setting of exogenous impact of environmental regulation competition cannot be applied to other countries. China's decentralization system is "Top to Bottom", resulting competition to increase or reduce environmental regulation. However, the so-called "Bottom to Top" in non-socialist countries, voters can eliminate governments that do not actively protect the environment through the mechanism of "Voting with Feet"(Zhang et al., 2010). Governments in such countries are more inclined to improve the intensity of environmental regulation, which is different from China. When applied our model to these countries, the exogenous condition of environmental regulation competition needs to be changed.
7.The reviewer’s comment: Was it purposeful to leave the question of the implication of gas on air pollution, differently from what other authors (cited in the paper) did?
Answer: Thank you for pointing this out. The reviewer's question we mentioned is to distinguish the research perspective of this article from previous research. Existing related literatures take environmental regulation along with natural gas consumption as factors affecting air pollution (Line 79-103). Therefore, natural gas consumption and environmental regulation were taken as independent variables (X), and air pollution was taken as dependent variables (Y) to build a measurement model in previous studies.
While our research focuses on the potential impact of environmental regulation policies on natural gas consumption.
References
Zhang W, Zhang L, Zhang K. 2010.China ’s environmental regulation intensity and its evolution of inter-provincial competition: An analysis based on the two-region spatial Durbin fixed effect model. Management World, 12: 34-44.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have tried to incorporate this reviewer's comments and suggestions as much as possible.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable opinions and recognition of our work.
Reviewer 2 Report
I would like the authors to add to the article what they mentioned in their reply to this Review, which is an interesting comment, so I suggest that it be included in the paper (with the appropriate adaptations and corrections, I made some!):
"The model can be applied to measure the path of environmental regulation affecting natural gas consumption in other countries with different systems you mentioned. But the setting of the exogenous impact of environmental regulation competition cannot be applied to other countries. China's decentralization system is "Top to Bottom", resulting in competition to increase or reduce environmental regulation. However, the so-called "Bottom to Top" in non-socialist countries, voters can eliminate governments that do not actively protect the environment through the mechanism of "Voting with Feet"(Zhang et al., 2010). Governments in such countries are more inclined to improve the intensity of environmental regulation, which is different from China. When applied our model to these countries, the exogenous condition of environmental regulation competition needs to be changed."
Author Response
Thank you very much for your valuable opinions and recognition of our work.
We have added your suggestions to the discussion section 5.3 (Line 514-527) as a brief discussion on the universality of our model.
