Mitigating energy production-based carbon dioxide emissions in Argentina: the roles of renewable energy and economic globalization.

Abstract

The energy sector of Argentina is predominantly reliant on fossil fuels. Consequently, such fossil fuel dependency within the nation's power sector, in particular, has aggravated the environmental qualityin Argentina by amplifying the nation'senergy production-based carbon emissionlevels. However, keeping into consideration the international commitments pledged byArgentinaunder the Paris Accord and the Sustainable Development Goals agenda, it is pertinent for this South American countryto curb its energy production-based emissionofgreenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Against this milieu, this study examines the impacts of renewable electricity generation, economic globalization, economic growth, and urbanization on carbon dioxide emissions generated from the production of electricity and heat in the context ofArgentina. Using annual frequency data from 1971 to 2016, recent econometric methods are applied to control for multiple structural breaks in the data. The major findings from the ecnometric analyses affirmed long-run associations between renewable electricity generation, economic globalization, economic growth, urbanization, and energy production-based carbon dioxide emissions in Argentina. Besides, enhancing renewable electricity output shares is found to curb these emissions while economic globalization and urbanization are witnessed to boost them. Moreover, renewable electricity generation and economic globalization are found to jointly reduce the energy production-related carbon dioxideemissions in Argentina. The results also validate the authenticity of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC)hypothesis. Finally, the causality analysis reveals evidence of unidirectional causalities running from renewable electricity generation, economic globalization, economic growth, and urbanization to energy production-related carbon dioxide emissions in Argentina. In line with these findings, this study recommends several viable policies which can be implemented to help Argentina control the growth of its energy production-based carbon dioxideemissions.