To study the sustainable development of the green technology innovation system (GTIS), more and more people have begun to pay attention to the behavior evolution and strategic choice of participants. This paper develops a four‐participant evolutionary game model to study the interaction and behavior evolution of government, financial institutions, enterprises, and the public on green technology innovation (GTI), determines the payoff matrix of GTIS, derives replicator dynamic equations, calculates evolutionary stability strategies (ESSs) of participants, and identifies evolution paths of ESSs through numerical simulations. The findings show that in most cases, the government prefers to adopt “weak supervision” strategies to regulate the market, and the public prefers to adopt “supervision” strategies to supervise enterprises. Encouraging enterprises to implement GTI through subsidies and funding support is a vital means in the initial stage of sustainable development. It is imperative to establish a multi‐participant collaborative governance mechanism to promote the sustained and sound GTIS development.

Under the carbon tax policy, the vehicle remanufacturing has become popular, which threatens the new vehicle market. Facing the complicated competitive environment, the automobile manufacturer always adjusts product modular design to deal with the challenges from the internal and external remanufacturing. Currently, considering the impacts of the complicated market competitions and product modular design on the enterprise's operation management, how the carbon tax policy affects the vehicle remanufacturing is still uncertain. Thus, we construct a duopoly remanufacturing competition model consisting of an automobile manufacturer and remanufacturer with the aim of maximizing profit and determine the optimal product modular design, production, and remanufacturing decisions as well as profits. Then, we explore the impacts of the carbon tax on the vehicle remanufacturing supply chain from the perspectives of the economic, environment, and consumer surplus. The results show that the carbon tax is always disadvantageous to automobile manufacturer's profit but may benefit the automobile remanufacturer's profit. Contrary to the intuition, improving the carbon tax is not always conducive to the environment and harmful to the consumer.