This paper examines the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in Vietnam between 1977 and 2019. Using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach, we find an inverted N-shaped relation between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions in both the long- and short-run. The econometric results also reveal that energy consumption and urbanization statistically positively impact pollution. The long-run Granger causality test shows a unidirectional causality from energy consumption and economic growth to pollution while there is no causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. These suggest some crucial policies for curtailing emissions without harming economic development. In the second step, we also employed the back-propagation neural networks (BPN) to compare the work of econometrics in carbon dioxide emissions forecasting. A 5-4-1 multi-layer perceptron with BPN and learning rate was set at 0.1, which outperforms the ARDL’s outputs. Our findings suggest the potential application of machine learning to notably improve the econometric method’s forecasting results in the literature.