In order to analyze the influential mechanism of carbon intensity, industrial structure and environmental regulation, sample data from 30 provinces（due to the lack of data, the statistical data mentioned here do not include the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Macao Special Administrative Region and Taiwan Province） in China from 2010 to 2019 were selected to establish a panel vector autoregressive model of carbon intensity, industrial structure and environmental regulation. Impulse response analysis and prediction variance method were used for empirical research. The study has shown that the two of the three have a bilateral effect, but the degree of the effect is not the same. By accelerating the transformation of industrial structure and improving the intensity of environmental regulation, the requirements of industrial structure optimization and environmental protection will be further strengthened, and carbon intensity will be effectively reduced. In addition, changes in the intensity of environmental regulation will also have an impact on the improvement of industrial structure.