In the political context of “carbon peaking” and “carbon neutrality” proposed by the Chinese government, this paper investigates the spatio-temporal evolution of land use transition in China after the implementation of the carbon emission trading scheme (CETS). Based on the analysis of the spatio-temporal evolution, we discuss the spatial spillover of the policy effects. With the help of China’s CETS policy, this study explores the above issues with the main observation samples of the six provincial pilots included in CETS. Using the entropy weighting method, the indicator construction method, and local Moran’s I test, this paper takes 30 provincial areas in China from 2010 to 2017 as the full sample, and draws the following conclusions: (1) both the economic and environmental effects generated by CETS can optimize land use transition in the pilot areas, but the effective time points of the two are different; (2) the time for land use transition to be optimized by the two effects of CETS is different, among which the economic effect takes effect faster than the environmental effect; and (3) there is spatial spillover of the optimization effect of CETS on land use transition, but the specific effect depends on the industrial structure and development plan of the pilot areas.