The anthropogenic consequences of energy consumption in E7 economies: Juxtaposing roles of renewable, coal, nuclear, oil and gas energy: Evidence from panel quantile method

Abstract

The emerging industrialized seven (E7) economies are not excluded from the global warming issues which is a major problem for most economies. The E7 member countries have partaken in policies to mitigate against global warming in terms of decoupling CO2 emission from economic growth trajectory in the highlighted economies. It is on this premise that the present study is motivated to consider the connection among economic growth, pollutant emissions, coal rent while accounting for the role of other co-variates such as CO2 damage and energy from a nuclear energy source, oil gas energy between 1990 and 2016 on an annual frequency. This study adopts the use of panel ordinary least squares alongside panel quantile regression to explore the coal rent-energy and environment nexus. The empirical result shows a positive and significant effect of both real GDP and coal rent on CO2 emissions. More precisely, a 1% increase in GDP growth increases pollution emission by 0.400% while for coal rent, an increase in coal consumption dampens environmental quality by 0.088% as reported by the panel regression which is resonated by the quantile regression estimations at different tails of the data. Nevertheless, we observe that 0.95 percentile GDP growth strongly contributes to environmental pollution while at the median tail i.e. 0.5 percentile renewable energy consumption dampens the adverse effect of environmental degradation. Additionally, renewable energy, on the other hand, was found a negative and significant impact on CO2 emissions in E7 countries as a 1% increase in renewable energy consumption improves environmental quality by 0.588% Moreover, the estimated results indicate that regulation of coal consumption through the rent in addition to the cost of carbon damage will further increase the CO2 emissions in E7 countries. This study implies that putting stringent regulations on coal consumption as it concerns the increasing cost of carbon damage will not be of help to environmental sustainability within the E7 economies. The adoption of renewable energy consumption, nuclear energy, oil energy will reduce CO2 emissions in E7 countries. Thus, suggesting a paradigm shift for low-carbon energy sources which are more environmentally friendly.