It is important to effectively reduce carbon emissions and ensure the simultaneous adjustment of economic development and environmental protection. Therefore, we used Kaya identity to screen the factors influencing carbon emissions and conducted preliminary qualitative analyses, including grey relation analysis and linear regression analysis, on important variables to establish a vector autoregression (VAR) model based on their annual data to empirically analyze the influencing factors of carbon emissions. The results showed that economic growth effect, energy intensity effect and embodied carbon in foreign trade were the key factors affecting carbon emissions, among which the economic growth effect contributed the most. Accordingly, we propose countermeasures including technological innovation to reduce energy intensity, the development of new energy sources to improve energy structure, acceleration of industrial structure transfer, and optimization of trade structure.