Most of the existing literatures which studied the economic consequences of climate change focus on the benefits of adaptive behaviors, but ignore the energy consumption and the pollution emission costs behind them. In order to investigate the impact of climate change on economic growth, energy conservation and emission reduction, this paper uses the non-radical directional distance function(NDDF) to calculate the green economic efficiency of Chinese cities from 2013 to 2016. We evaluate the economic consequences of climate change by identifying the causal effect of daily temperature change on green economic efficiency.The research shows that based on the temperature range of 6-12℃, the drops or rises in temperature both have a negative impact on green economic efficiency. Moreover, this effect only exists in the developed cities, and is not significant in the backward cities, reflecting the “robbing the rich” characteristics of the economic consequences of climate change, which is totally different from the “assisting the poor” characteristics found in most previous articles. After the robustness test and exclusion of possible competitive explanations, this conclusion is still true. The mechanism test shows that the rise of temperature has produced such economic consequences by influencing the labor productivity, the efficiency of energy conservation and emission reduction, and the enforcement of local governments’ environmental rules. According to the RCP8.5 path of future climate change of China’s cities in the medium term (2041-2060) and long-term (2061-2080), the simulation results show that the increase of high-temperature days in the future will continue to affect the green economic efficiency adversely, and the negative impact will increase as time goes by. This study provides a new perspective for understanding the economic consequences of climate change, and also offers an empirical basis to define the responsibilities of local governments in climate governance.
