Measuring the simultaneous effects of electricity consumption and production on carbon dioxide emissions (CO2e) in China: New evidence from an EKC-based assessment

Energy production has become an important concern because excessive coal and oil use for electricity generation and consumption in developing economies threaten the global environment. Past research mainly focuses on energy consumption, while there is a scarcity of models on the energy and electricity production-environmental pollution nexus in the Environmental Kuznets Curve literature. As an initial attempt, the paper examined the simultaneous impact of electricity production and electricity con-sumption on carbon dioxide emissions in one of the top energy-consuming, energy-producing, and carbon-emitting nations (China). The study applied the Zivot and Andrew tests to check the stationarity of the series with structural breaks. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method was to compute long-run coefficients using two separate models: Model 1 (total electricity production and environ-mental pollution) and Model 2 (total electricity consumption and environmental pollution) were considered. The results showed that electricity production and electricity consumption significantly contributed to environmental pollution in the short-and long-run. Apart from validating the EKC hy-pothesis (inverted-U-shaped curve) in the short-and long-run, the estimation demonstrated that agri-culture value-added mitigated the environmental pollution. The paper offers important policy implications. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study examines the impact of electricity production and consumption on environmental pollution and validates the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis. The results show that both electricity production and consumption significantly contribute to environmental pollution in both the short-term and long-term, while agriculture value-added plays a mitigating role.