CO₂ emissions increased by about 80% from 1991 to 2001, with industrial sectors accounting for 55% of the increased amount. Among all the industrial sectors, iron & steel, petrochemicals, electronics, textiles, pulp & paper and cement account for approximately three quarters of the total industrial CO₂ emissions. As a result, understanding driving factors behind increasing CO₂ emissions in the six sectors is valuable to related policy formation. This paper applies two-tier input-output structural decomposition analysis (I-O) to analyze the sources of change of energy intensive industries’ CO₂ emissions from 2002 to 2008. The result shows that: The net export of embodied carbon and the proportion of total domestic emissions are both increased; the export (import) scale effect of the two stages is both positive; the export (import) structure effect of the two stages is quite different. During the period 2005 to 2008, total export structure effect is 72.02 million tons, while total import structure effect is -31.24 million tons; effect of intermediate inputs has greatly improved. The export (import) intermediate inputs effect is -34.28(-49.42)million tons during the period 2005 to 2008, while it is 0.40(0.32)million tons during the period 2002 to 2005; the effect of carbon emissions per unit output value is also significantly improved, and decided mainly by the energy consumption per unit output value effect; effects of export(import) carbon emissions per unit of energy during the two stages are very small.