1. Introduction
Environmental protection is currently humanity’s greatest worldwide challenge. The world is entering an era of low-carbon development, and the shift to renewable energy sources is a worldwide objective. Now, global energy is evolving toward high efficiency [
1], cleanliness, and diversification, and key countries are accelerating the energy transition toward low carbonization or decarbonization [
2]. China has proposed carbon peak and carbon neutral targets to implement environmental protection actively, which is, on the one hand, an inherent requirement for China to achieve sustainable development and an irreplaceable grip to consolidate the construction of ecological civilization and succeed in the goal of creating a beautiful China; on the other hand, it is also the responsibility of China as a responsible power to fulfill its international commitment and promote the building of a sustainable global community. President Xi Jinping announced China’s new goal of actively addressing climate change twice in less than 100 days, first at the general debate on 22 September 2020. Then, on 12 December 2020, the Climate Ambition Summit was held to mark the 5th anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement. This strengthened China’s resolve to pursue a green and low-carbon development path and illustrated the blueprint for China’s future growth. It has also shown its role as a great power in the international community and provided a solid political impetus for the execution of the Paris Agreement, the worldwide climate protection process, and the green recovery after the pandemic.
President Xi Jinping stated in a speech, and he said, “China will make more effective efforts, enforce stricter rules and regulations to achieve the goal by 2060 [
3]”. The solemn dedication of. Then, at the general meeting, on 12 December 2020, Xi said that “by 2030 [
4], China’s CO2 emissions per unit of gross domestic product will decrease by more than 65 percent in comparison to 2005” [
5]. In this context, the Central Economic Work Conference convened in December 2020 identified “making effective use of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality” as one of 2021′s eight most important priorities. The 4th Session of the 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) in March 2021 adopted the “Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan and 2035 Vision for National Economic and Social Development of the People’s Republic of China”, which emphasized “completing the target of national independent response to climate change and specifying an action plan for peaking carbon emissions by 2030”. In October 2022, Xi, General Secretary of the NPC Central Committee, reiterated that “we should actively and steadily promote carbon peaking and carbon neutrality” and that “achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality is a change that will affect the long-term development of China and the world [
6]”.
China’s “double carbon” aim, also known as the carbon peak and carbon neutral aim, is the reflection of China’s promise of green and low-carbon development [
7], which will have a substantial impact on global climate change and China’s future socioeconomic growth [
8]. Carbon reduction must be achieved by energy substitution, energy saving, source reduction [
9], efficiency improvement [
10], process transformation, recycling, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage to realize this objective and achieve green, low-carbon change [
11]. In this series of procedures, carbon capture, use, and storage technology are among the most feasible and good methods to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and combat climate change [
12]. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) stands for the industrial process of letting out CO
2 from industrial [
13], energy, and other emission sources or the atmosphere and directly utilizing or storing it to reduce CO
2 emissions [
14]. CCUS is a crucial technology option for global low-carbon development [
15]. Carbon capture technology, which plays a vital role as the principal link [
16], is still in the industrial demonstration phase in China, and there is still a great deal of space for improvement [
17].
China’s economic growth has been driven by the traditional model of relying primarily on conventional factor inputs and resource consumption since the reform and opening policy [
18]. The country has made significant contributions to the global economy. As China is no longer inclined to high-speed development, but to pursue a higher quality of development, the current issues of an inappropriate industrial structure, poor value-added technologies, and environmental limits will become “bottlenecks” for high-quality economic development [
19]. In this context, academics typically view innovation as the most critical factor in sustaining high-quality economic growth. The Party and the administration also highly value innovation’s crucial role in fostering economic growth. The report of the 20th Party Congress reaffirms that innovation is the primary factor driving development [
20], emphasizes innovation’s important place in the context of China’s modernization, and makes significant arrangements surrounding innovation-driven development [
21]. Based on this, how to actualize the improvement of companies’ green innovation capability [
22] and promote the transformation and upgrading of firms with green development [
23] is a genuine challenge that must be resolved as soon as possible.
Consequently, based on the current development situation of carbon capture technology and the carbon capture industry [
24] and the critical role of carbon capture technology and the carbon capture industry in achieving the goal of “double carbon” and high-quality development [
25]. It is undoubtedly of great significance for China’s carbon capture industry to face up to the critical position of the improvement of green innovation ability for the development of technology and industry and to keep stable and far ahead on the road of healthy development.
Many studies have pointed out that environmental regulation is an effective way to solve the problem of promoting enterprises’ green innovation capability and industrial structure upgrading [
26,
27,
28]. After sorting out the existing studies on the effects of various specific environmental regulation measures on firms’ green innovation performance, it was found that they are relatively mature in terms of research theory and research methodology. Li et al. (2022) selected Chinese firms as a sample to study the effects of environmental regulation on firms’ innovation outcomes. It was concluded that stricter environmental regulation had a positive impact on the increase in firms’ innovation output [
29]. Liu and Li (2022) explored how to achieve a win–win situation for both environmental protection and economic development by focusing on the impact of environmental regulation on green innovation, and their study found that a pilot carbon emissions trading policy promoted green innovation among firms in the region [
30]. A more in-depth study classifies the types of environmental regulation. Song and Han (2022) decompose environmental regulation into two types, where command-based environmental regulation has a negative impact on carbon reduction and market-based environmental regulation has the opposite [
31]. Sun et al. (2023) examined the heterogeneity of these two types of environmental regulation and conclude that only enhanced environmental regulation can examined the heterogeneity of these two types of environmental regulation and concluded that only enhanced environmental regulation can achieve green development of the marine economy [
32]. These inconsistent findings provide two important inspirations for empirical studies: first, it is reasonable to distinguish the types of environmental regulations, and there are obvious differences in the mechanisms of action of command-based and market-based environmental regulations on green technological innovation [
33]. Theoretically, market-based environmental regulations can provide more flexible and effective incentives for innovation than command-based environmental regulations [
34,
35]. In the process of environmental regulation policies playing a role in improving firms’ green innovation, previous studies have pointed out that firms’ research and development (R&D) investment and environmental protection investment play an important role, which provides necessary insights for this study [
36]. Huang et al. (2021) found through an empirical study that environmental regulation can stimulate firm innovation by enhancing firms’ R&D investment, which is particularly evident in Chinese low-carbon pilot cities [
37]. Ahmed et al. (2022) and Guo et al. (2021) showed that increasing national public investment in renewable energy is important to curb CO
2 emission reduction and green energy transition [
38,
39]. Meanwhile, there are some differences in the innovation behavior of firms due to their different property rights. By combing existing studies, we found that the results differ by the nature of firms’ property rights under the same environmental regulatory constraints. Castelnovo (2022) found that patents or the sales of new products were used as indicators of innovation performance, and government subsidies had a stronger effect on the innovation capacity of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The study found that government subsidies had a stronger effect on the innovation capacity of SOEs, regardless of whether the number of patent applications or new product sales revenue was chosen as a measure of innovation performance [
40]. It has also been argued that environmental regulation can have a negative impact on SOEs’ performance, and SOEs tend to invest inefficiently when they receive additional credit resources, and these can lead to a decrease in firms’ technical efficiency [
41]. In addition, existing research on how digital transformation will affect firms’ green innovation mainly supports that advancing digital transformation can help improve resource allocation efficiency and integration efficiency and improve firms’ green innovation performance [
42]. Digital transformation is important for companies to achieve value enhancement by promoting an efficient flow of data elements and enhancing their innovation capabilities [
43,
44]. Additionally, it has been shown that digital transformation also helps to improve the supply of trade credit, thus significantly enhancing the external financing capacity of firms [
45]. Few existing studies have explored the significance of digital transformation in the context of environmental regulation, so it is also worth investigating what role digital transformation plays in the path of environmental regulation’s impact on green innovation in carbon capture firms.
Moreover, in general, looking at the existing research in the academic circle, the relatively mature part focuses on several relatively independent discussions on government subsidies and enterprise R&D innovation, environmental regulation and industrial structure upgrading [
46], intelligence, digitalization, and enterprise green innovation capabilities [
47], or is more common in the relatively common realistic context. However, in the existing literature, especially in the context of China’s carbon capture listed companies that have a direct significance for the realization of the “dual carbon” goal, the role of environmental regulation as an incentive for enterprises’ environmental protection investment, and the role of enterprises’ environmental protection investment as an intermediary for enterprises’ green innovation under the support of regional intelligence and enterprise digitalization. Thus, the discussion on the complete transmission path to promote the realization of the “double carbon” goal and the transformation and upgrading of the industrial structure and high-quality development is relatively rare.
Therefore, the novelty and contribution of this paper focus on the basis of existing research, introduces and launches from the introduction and correlation of environmental regulation and green innovation of carbon capture listed companies in China, and further evaluates the impact of environmental regulation on green innovation capability of carbon capture listed companies as a whole through theoretical analysis, reasonable variable selection and empirical research under model construction, Through the analysis of data, we further explore the mechanism of environmental regulation on the green innovation promotion function of carbon capture listed enterprises, and further exert the positive incentive effect of environmental regulation policies on improving the green innovation performance of carbon capture green enterprises in China. At the same time, further study the impact of environmental regulation on green innovation through the play path of the intermediary role of enterprise environmental protection investment, and straighten out the play channel of this intermediary role. In addition, combined with relevant data, we determine the different effects of enterprises with varying rights of property on the improvement of green innovation capability of carbon capture listed enterprises under the influence of environmental regulations, so as to explore the reasons reflected behind the data and implement policies according to the property rights of different enterprises. Furthermore, it discusses the impact of digital transformation degree on environmental regulation on the green innovation process of carbon capture listed enterprises, and studies explicitly how to fully mobilize the regulatory role of the digital transformation degree of enterprises.
Through this study, we are expected to fill the gap between environmental regulation and green innovation in China’s carbon capture industry at the theoretical level under the guidance of the overall goal of sustainable development [
48]. With the help of the logic and suggestions of this paper, we can better form a new and more efficient linkage between the government, enterprises, and other stakeholders, serving the government at the legislative level to introduce and implement specific policy formulation on environmental regulation of carbon capture listed enterprises [
49]. It serves as a feasible path for the maximum efficiency transformation of China’s carbon capture listed enterprises under the general background of environmental regulation and specific policies, and focuses on the development of carbon capture enterprises, and explores constructively how environmental regulation can better promote green innovation of China’s carbon capture listed enterprises from the aspects of environmental legislation policies, artificial intelligence development, and intellectual property protection. We should take various measures to promote green innovation of carbon capture technology and transformation and upgrading of the carbon capture industry from the perspective of environmental regulation, so as to give full play to comprehensive governance efficiency, and further promote the better realization of China’s “dual carbon” goals, sustainable development, and high-quality development.
The introduction introduces the relevant content of carbon capture, analyzes the problem of insufficient innovation ability faced by the current enterprise development, makes a supplement based on combining the existing literature, expounds the similarities and differences between this paper and the existing research, and finally puts forward the research vision. The second part is hypothesis development, which, respectively, expounds on the relationship between environmental regulation and green innovation of enterprises, the intermediary role of environmental protection investment, the role difference of different enterprise property rights, and the regulatory role of enterprise digital transformation. The third part is the research method. While adopting the literature and hypothesis methods, this paper uses more data analysis methods to explain the relationship between various elements by establishing models to draw more scientific conclusions. The fourth and fifth parts are mainly the result analysis and discussion. The sixth part is based on the previous part and put forward the conclusion and policy implications.
5. Discussion
According to the data in
Section 4.4, the environmental protection investment of carbon capture enterprises can promote green innovation. In the process of enterprises increasing environmental investment, their green innovation will also be improved. The environmental investment of carbon capture enterprises is an intermediary between government environmental regulation and enterprise green innovation [
95]. On the one hand, environmental regulation can play a very direct role in improving the green innovation ability of enterprises; on the other hand, government environmental regulation can also promote green innovation by promoting enterprises to increase environmental investment.
In the process of enactment and enforcement of relevant legal provisions, the government regulates the economic activities of China’s carbon capture listed enterprises to reduce pollution and correct the negative externalities of the market [
96]. It influences the technological innovation, input, and output behavior of corresponding enterprises by imposing environmental constraints on China’s carbon capture listed enterprises, through the innovation compensation effect and optimization of factor allocation, the industrial structure of carbon capture will be rationally guided towards rationalization and upgrading. China’s carbon capture listed enterprises will increase their investment in environmental protection and will also promote the accumulation of resources of China’s carbon capture listed enterprises through the emergence of technological innovation, new products, and new methods [
97]. The corresponding environmental protection investment and its role in R&D activities improve the innovation capacity of enterprises.
Through the analysis of the data in
Section 4.5, it can be concluded that the nature of enterprise ownership can strongly and directly affect the effectiveness of environmental regulation. Compared with non-SOEs, environmental regulations can effectively lead SOEs to carry out green transformation and upgrading. However, the impact of enterprise environmental protection investment on green innovation is not apparent between SOEs and non-SOEs. Under the same conditions, the green innovation performance of SOEs is significantly better than that of non-SOEs.
The conclusion is also consistent with the previous theoretical discussion. The extent to which enterprises with government background can improve their green innovation capability under environmental regulation is more substantial than other enterprises, to a considerable extent, because SOES have advantages in existing resources and stuff, and because SOES can more easily access funds and policy resources that are more closely related to green innovation in environmental regulation [
98].
It can be concluded from the data in
Section 4.6 that the degree of enterprise digital transformation plays a negative role in the role of environmental regulation in green innovation of carbon capture listed enterprises. On the one hand, the degree of enterprise digital transformation cannot enhance the promotion effect of enterprise environmental protection investment on enterprise green innovation. It cannot play a positive regulatory role [
90]. On the other hand, it even plays a significant negative regulatory effect in the first half path of the intermediary effect model, “environmental regulation-environmental protection investment”.
After analysis, the main reason for this phenomenon is that the existing environmental regulation mode conflicts with the more common path of corporate digital transformation. The positive regulatory role of enterprise digital transformation degree in the promotion of environmental regulation on enterprises’ green innovation ability is mainly achieved through enhancing enterprises’ financing ability, strengthening external supervision and alleviating internal agency conflicts, optimizing internal and external resource allocation, etc., the current digital transformation of China’s carbon capture listed enterprises does not correspond to the promotion of environmental regulation on enterprises’ green innovation ability, but partially led to the opposite result. The increased transparency brought about by the digital transformation has allowed investors to obtain adverse signals from environmental supervision and other negative effects. In addition, some studies have pointed out that the formation process of green innovation capability, as a manifestation of the dynamic capability concept of enterprises, may be affected by organizational inertia [
99]. Organizational inertia makes the past development path of an organization fail to adjust its behavior in time according to major national policies and social environment changes, which leads to its inability to adapt to the trend and severe erosion of organizational change and innovation; in turn, it significantly inhibits the role of environmental regulation in green innovation of carbon capture listed enterprises [
31]. These problems need to be further optimized and adjusted under the guidance of the government and the cooperation of enterprises, as well as comprehensively implemented under the background of digital transformation to make a positive connection between digital transformation and green innovation of carbon capture listed enterprises.