严重的雾霾笼罩中国,成为国内外舆论热议的焦点。为应对空气污染,政府着力调整能源消费结构,期望通过天然气替代燃煤的方式缓解空气质量问题。本文试图通过综合评估天然气替代燃煤的经济效益和环境效益①回答三个问题:天然气替代燃煤能带来多少的环境收益?天然气替代燃煤会造成多少的经济成本?高价天然气究竟能不能解决中国的环境质量问题?论证结果表明:首先,就目前的天然气价格和产业素质而言,天然气替代燃煤的环境成本接近环境收益10%,较高的环境成本足以使空气治理的效果大打折扣;进而,高价天然气不仅间接产生环境成本,还直接构成机会成本,把创造的财富大量用于换取能源资源,就没有更多的财富去解决民生问题,用于整个国家社会的创新,用于增强国家的竞争力,用于改善国家实质性的安全环境;最后,如果以一句话总结天然气替代燃煤时机尚不成熟的原因,就是当前的天然气价格与目前经济社会发展水平不协调。因此,稳定燃煤使用量,以技术手段严格控制燃煤排污,是当前阶段无奈却理性的选择。如果想要通过推广使用天然气改善环境质量,就需要从源头上转变经济发展方式,降低单位GDP能耗,同时提高进口天然气的议价权,使天然气相对价格与我国经济社会发展水平协调。 Serious haze enveloped China, becoming the focus of public opinion at home and abroad. In response to air pollution, the government focused on adjusting the energy consumption structure and looked forward to alleviating the air quality issue by replacing natural coal with natural gas. This paper tries to evaluate the economic and environmental benefits of replacing coal with natural gas by comprehensively evaluating the following three questions: How much environmental benefits can natural gas replace coal? How much economic cost can natural gas replace coal? China’s environmental quality issues The demonstration results show that: First of all, for the current price of natural gas and industrial quality, the environmental cost of replacing coal with natural gas is close to 10% of the environmental benefits, and the high environmental cost is enough to greatly reduce the effect of air treatment. Furthermore, high-value natural gas not only indirectly generates environmental costs, but also directly constitutes the opportunity costs, the wealth created for a large number of exchange for energy resources, there is no more wealth to solve the livelihood problems for the entire national community innovation, to enhance the country Finally, if one word summarizes the immature timing of natural gas replacement coal, the reason is that current natural gas prices are incompatible with the current economic and social development level. Therefore, stabilizing the amount of coal used and strictly controlling coal-fired sewerage by technical means is a helpless but rational choice in the current stage. If you want to promote the use of natural gas to improve the quality of the environment, you need to change the mode of economic development from the source to reduce the energy consumption per unit of GDP while increasing the bargaining power of imported natural gas so that the relative price of natural gas and China’s economic and social development level coordination.