Abstract
A high proportion of nonrenewable energy in total energy consumption is leading the world economies toward severe environmental issues. This has motivated the environmentalists to come forward for encouraging masses around the world to use environmentally friendly renewable energy instead of environment-damaging nonrenewable energy. The UNDP is also playing its role in spreading the importance of clean energy in goal 7 of the SDGs. Therefore, the present study is aimed to inquire about the asymmetric influence of clean and unclean energy consumption on environmental quality in environmentally poor economies. In the present study, data from forty-two environmentally poor economies for the period from 1995 to 2019 are extracted, and a heterogeneous pooled mean group estimator is employed to estimate the results. The findings expose that the use of clean energy initially improves transport-based environmental quality while it damages industry-based environmental quality in the beginning. In the later stage, the use of clean energy hurts transport-based environmental quality while it improves industry-based environmental quality. This concludes that the use of clean energy reveals a U-shaped impact on transport-based environmental quality but it has an inverted U-shaped impact on industry-based environmental quality in the selected economies. The results further expose that use of unclean energy is leaving an inverted U-shaped influence on transport-based environmental quality while it leaves a U-shaped impact on industry-based environmental quality. These results are important from a policy perspective as these help in controlling the net carbon emissions by targeting transport-based environmental quality in environmentally poor economies.
•The study finds asymmetric impact of energy on environmental quality.•The PMG estimator on an annual data series from 1995 to 2019 is applied.•Clean energy discloses U-shaped impact on transport based environmental quality.•It exposes inverted U-shaped impact on industrial based environmental quality.•Unclean energy reports opposite results as compared to the results of clean energy.