Novel research methods to evaluate renewable energy investment and environment: evidence from global data

Abstract

The global economy is facing a severe threat of global warming and climate change, where the primary cause of these issues is regarded as the carbon dioxide emissions. To eradicate such issues, this study tends to explore the global energy use, economic growth, renewable electricity and carbon emission throughout 1990–2020. Using various time-series econometric specifications, this study validates the stationarity of all these variables for the long-run estimations. Besides, this study detects the issue of data non-normality, due to which this study opted the novel and efficient quantile-on-quantile regression. The estimated outcomes asserted that energy use and economic growth significantly and severely enhance global carbon emissions at higher quantiles, whereas the magnitude of the influence is found weaker in the lower and lower-middle quantiles, thus validating energy use and economic growth as the factors of increased environmental degradation. On the contrary, renewable electricity significantly reduces the carbon emissions level only in the lower as and middle quantile, while the influence non-negative at the higher quantiles. This study recommends the use of renewable energy, increase renewable's investment, research and development, adoption energy efficient approaches to reduce fossil energy.