Do renewable energy and natural gas consumption mitigate CO(2)emissions in the USA? New insights from NARDL approach

Abstract

This article attempts to explore the asymmetric impact of renewable energy and natural gas consumptions on CO(2)emissions for the selected ten most populous states in the USA over the period from 1997 to 2017. For that purpose, the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) estimation technique, developed by Shin et al. (2014), decomposes the consumption of renewable energy and natural gas into positive and negative changes. The cointegration test results indicate that renewable energy and natural gas consumptions have a long-run connection with CO(2)emissions in the eight of states used in the study. Moreover, the results reveal that the long-run asymmetric impact of renewable energy and natural gas consumptions on CO(2)emissions differs from state to state. Finally, the study provides several important policy suggestions, including reducing the CO(2)emissions in the atmosphere.