Environmental concerns in the United States: Can renewable energy, fossil fuel energy, and natural resources depletion help?

Abstract

The United States is the second-largest polluter in the world, producing 4.7 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2020. At the Leaders' Climate Summit, the US president outlined specific targets to tackle climate change, including a 50 to 52 percent reduction in net CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. Therefore, it is critical to pinpoint the key factors succumbing to the heightened commitment to accomplishing the SDGs. The study explores the relationship between renewable energy, fossil fuel energy, natural resources depletion, and globalization on CO2 emissions in the United States from 1980 to 2018 by employing the novel dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) simulations and Kernel-based Regularized Least Squares (KRLS) machine learning approach. The findings indicated that renewable energy has a positive long-term impact, suggesting that the United States has not yet reached a point where renewable energy sources are sufficient to reduce CO2 emissions. However, shock in fossil fuel energy increases CO2 emissions in the long run. The empirical findings reveal that natural resource depletion stimulates CO2 emissions in the short- and long run. Finally, globalization found no evidence to affect environmental pollution. The KRLS approach has confirmed the hypothesis substantially. The results suggest the growth of renewable energy and diminishing dependency on fossil fuel use; also, the management of ecological footprint could play an imperative role in environmental sustainability.