Do climate technologies and recycling asymmetrically mitigate consumption-based carbon emissions in the United States? New insights from Quantile ARDL

Abstract

Improving environmental quality has become one of the utmost essential policy agendas of the United States (US). The susceptibility to climate change adversities has motivated the need to construct and identify the factors that can function to evaluate and ensure environmental sustainability. Although few studies have highlighted the importance of recycling and technology in tackling environmental woes across different industries and sectors, little is known about the impact of national-level recycling and green technology innovation on consumption-based (trade-adjusted) carbon emissions. Therefore, this study scrutinizes the asymmetric linkages between recycling, climate technologies, trade, and consumption-based carbon emissions (CCE) in the US from 1990Q1 to 2018Q4. It employs novel Quantile Autoregressive Distributive Lag (QARDL) and Granger Causality-in-Quantiles to discover the asymmetric long-run cointegration and causality across the diverse data distribution. The long-run results indicate that recycling and climate-related technologies significantly mitigate CCE in the long run, mainly at lower-higher (0.05–070) and lower-highest (0.05–0.95) emissions quantiles, respectively. Trade-based covariates suggest that imports significantly contribute to CCE from upper-middle to highest (0.70–0.95) emissions quantiles, while exports significantly reduce CCE from lowest to highest (0.05–0.95) emissions quantiles. The short-run elasticities echo a similar direction; however, their magnitude and significance vary across quantiles. Moreover, Granger-causality outcomes in quantiles confirm one-way causality between recycling, climate technologies, and CCE, and two-way causality between exports, imports, economic growth, and CCE across major quantiles. These results provide pertinent policy suggestions for all stakeholders.