Greenhouse gases, globalization, and energy use nexus: The heterogenous roles of tech-innovations in environmental sustainability of world’s top-3 emitters

Climate change exerts significant threat to global environmental sustainability. As such, curtailing greenhouse gases (GHG) to limit global average temperature below 1.5 °C has become a major climate agenda in the 21^st century. In this study, we examine how tech-innovation, renewable energy, and globalization shape this sustainability goal via a tripartite investigation of three important pollutants (2 GHG: carbon dioxide-CO<inf>2</inf> & Methane-CH<inf>4</inf>, and 1 harmful air pollutant: nitrogen dioxide-NO<inf>2</inf>) among the world’s top 3 emitting countries, namely China, the USA, and India. FMOLS and DOLS empirical techniques help to control for income differences among the countries while simulating the long-run coefficients of the impacts of tech-innovation, renewable energy, and globalization on these pollutants within a three-phase model using data between 1990 and 2022. Additionally, Dumitrescu-Hurlin's approach reveals the direction of causality relationship in the model. Following the results, we obtained evidence of the environmental gains from tech-innovations and renewable energy as the duo significantly curtail both CO<inf>2</inf> and CH<inf>4</inf> emissions. On the contrary, the emission-triggering impacts of globalization were observed, thus showcasing the negative environmental side of globalization. This evidence was further reinforced by the bidirectional causality between globalization and NO<inf>2</inf>. Hence, for the authorities of these top-3 pollutant-emitting countries, these findings are suggestive of the need for more actions to strategically bolster the integrated deployment of both tech-innovation and renewables to accelerate the progress toward SDG-13 of climate action.