The impact of non-renewable energy production and energy usage on carbon emissions: Evidence from China

Abstract

A high level of carbon dioxide (CO2) emission has become a global issue due to extensive production and energy usage that needs regulators’ attention and researchers’ emphasis. Hence, the study aims to explore the effectiveness of energy production and usage on carbon dioxide emission in China. The current study has taken the electricity production from oil, coal and nuclear as the measurement of energy production, while fossil fuel energy consumption and energy use have been taken as the measurement of energy usage, and energy import has been taken as the control variable. The secondary data has been gathered using a secondary source like World Bank from 1991 to 2020. The Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lag (QARDL) was employed by the study to examine the linkage among variables, while the Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) test was adopted to check the stationarity. The results revealed that electricity production from oil, coal and nuclear has a positive connection with CO2 emission. The findings also exposed that the FFEC, energy import, and energy use also have a positive linkage with CO2 emission. This study monitors the policymakers while establishing regulations to control CO2 emissions by limiting the country's energy production and usage.