Air pollution resulting from the rapid development of industries has become a serious environmental issue in Taiwan, although the blooming industrial activities have resulted in rapid economic growth. The consequences of rapid economic growth are reflected in air pollution. A statistical model and grey relational grade system are used to quantify the distribution of various air pollutants such as particulate matter 10, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and ozone from 2008 to 2017. It is found that the gross domestic product (GDP) and air pollution display a positive correlation, whereby the p‐value is statistically significant at 5% confidence interval and the correlation coefficients between GDP and air pollution are positive at 0.056 and 6.59, respectively. Moreover, the relationship between air pollution and GDP displays similar trend for both seasonal and annual data. The empirical results of this study are robust during the northeast monsoon season because the values are found to be slightly higher in such season. Therefore, it can be suggested that the GDP growth in Taiwan is significantly related to air pollution and the only optimal mechanism to avoid drastic climate change is to implement a balance between GDP growth and air pollution control.

Copper in the international market has been priced by copper futures contracts from the London Metal Exchange (LME) and the New York Commodity Exchange (COMEX). Copper prices initially showed a downward trend until March 2020, but after the outbreak of COVID-19, they continued to rise and reached a record high in May 2021. The rise in copper demand also stimulated the continuous growth of copper production. However, a significant amount of smelting flue gas is produced in the copper smelting process. The main component of the flue gas is SO2 and other acid gases, which pollute the environmental atmosphere. At the same time, due to the Chinese government’s effective control of the pandemic, China’s economy continued to grow. Therefore, as one of the world’s largest copper consumers and producers, China’s futures market has attracted attention for its influence on copper pricing and the pollution caused by copper smelting. In this paper, we used the grey entropy method to compare the influence of copper prices on the three futures markets and changes in China’s air pollution in recent years. Our results show that before the pandemic, the influence of the LME futures copper price was the same as the COMEX but greater than the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE). After the outbreak of the pandemic, the influence of the SHFE copper futures price significantly improved and slightly exceeded the LME and COMEX. This result echoes our finding that SO2 has caused serious air pollution in recent years.