Does Renewable Energy Development Decouple Economic Growth from CO2 Emissions?

By Richard York, J. McGee. 2017

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We assess how renewable electricity production interacts with GDP per capita to influence CO2 emissions per capita, analyzing cross-national data from 1960 to 2012. We find an interaction effect between the quantity of renewables and GDP per capita, where, counterintuitively, economic growth is more closely tied to emissions in nations with a large share of their electricity from renewable sources and growth of renewable electricity has a smaller suppressive effect on emissions in more affluent nations. Additional analyses suggest that this relationship emerges because renewable energy sources tend to suppress nuclear energy in affluent nations, thereby unintentionally perpetuating reliance on fossil fuels.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1d51550fd93d2be7268f69419011682e43f9228

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

Citations in the corpus

The roles of export diversification and composite country risks in carbon emissions abatement: evidence from the signatories of the regional comprehensive economic partnership agreement (2021, background): “York and Mcgee (2017), using a panel of 128 global economies, also showed that there is a negative relationship between renewable energy shares and CO2 emissions. At the same time, Liu and Bae (2018) also reported similar findings in China, where the authors claim that increasing the share of renewa”
Connecting the sustainable development goals by their energy inter-linkages (2018, result): “…(2013); Jackson and Senker (2011); New Climate Economy (2014); OECD (2017); Schandl et al. (2016); Schwerhoff and Sy (2017); Shahbaz et al. (2016); York and McGee (2017) Decarboniza on of the energy system through an up-scaling of renewables and energy efficiency is consistent with sustained…”