Do clean energy and dependence on natural resources stimulate environmental sustainability? A new approach with load capacity factor and temperature

Abstract

Abstract India, not being an exception from the rest of the globe, has also been suffering from the unprecedented challenges of survival of the ecosphere, which is highly threatened by a continuous weakening of the environmental quality as a result of accelerated accumulation of anthropogenic emissions in the biosphere. As an immediate aftermath of the famous Glasgow Conference of Parties (COP26), while the Government of India is aiming to find realistic solutions to achieve net zero emissions goals by 2070 without much confrontion with its ambitious economic progression goals, accordingly proposes the alternative pathway to achieve environmental sustainability goals, this study has considered one of the three pivotal drivers of economic sustainability in the modern era of digitization, that is, natural resources rent, renewable energy consumption, and economic growth and examined their role on rendering environmental sustainability. Instead of CO 2 emissions, load capacity factor and temperature have been considered proxies of environmental quality. This study has employed a novel dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) estimation technique to portray the short‐ and long‐run elasticity of environmental quality indicators by considering 48 years of annual time series data from 1970 to 2017. The findings of this study have documented that while natural resources rent and economic growth stimulate environmental squalor, renewable energy consumption promotes environmental sustainability. This study also unveiled different causal relationships using the frequency domain causality analysis. Subsequently, this study designs some vital policy measures and integration of which in the existing energy‐climate framework may assist Indian policymakers in achieving the net zero climate goal.