The causalities between carbon dioxide emissions, renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, economic growth, and urbanisation were examined for the panel of five countries (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela) from Southern Common Market, over thirty-five years (1980–2014), using a panel vector autoregression. The empirical analysis pointed to the existence of bi-directional causality between the consumption of fossil fuels, economic growth, consumption of renewable energy, and carbon dioxide emissions; and a uni-directional relationship between the consumption of renewable energy and urbanisation. The research also proves that the countries from Southern Common Market are dependent on fossil fuels consumption and that urbanisation process is highly linked with the consumption of this type of energy. Additionally, it was found that these countries have low renewable energy participation in their energy mix. Nevertheless, a substitutability effect between the consumption of renewable energy and the consumption of fossil fuels, as a possible response to periods of scarcity in reservoirs, was detected. Policymakers of Southern Common Market countries should speed up the deep reforms regarding renewable energy to mitigate environmental degradation.

This analysis explored the effect of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in a panel of twenty-nine countries from the European Union (EU) from 2010 to 2020. The method of moments quantile regression (MM-QR) was used, and the ordinary least squares with fixed effects (OLSfe) was used to verify the robustness of the results. The MM-QR support that in all three quantiles, economic growth causes a positive impact on GHGs. In the 50th and 75th quantiles, energy consumption causes a positive effect on GHGs. BEVs in the 25th, 50th, and 75th quantiles have a negative impact on GHGs. The OLSfe reveals that economic growth has a negative effect on GHGs, which contradicts the results from MM-QR. Energy consumption positively impacts GHGs. BEVs negatively impacts GHGs. Although the EU has supported a more sustainable transport system, accelerating the adoption of BEVs still requires effective political planning to achieve net-zero emissions. Thus, BEVs are an important technology to reduce GHGs to achieve the EU targets of decarbonising the energy sector. This research topic can open policy discussion between industry, government, and researchers, towards ensuring that BEVs provide a climate change mitigation pathway in the EU region.

This article investigates the effect of the renewable energy transition on CO₂ emissions of Latin American & Caribbean (LAC) countries in the period from 1990 to 2014. To this end, a panel autoregressive distributed lags (PARDL) model in the form of an unrestricted error-correction model (UECM) is estimated. The PARDL indicates that the ratio of renewable energy that is a proxy of the renewable energy transition in the short and long-run has a negative impact on emissions of CO₂ of −0.0675 and −0.0313, respectively. That is, the process of the energy transition can mitigate environmental degradation in LAC countries. Moreover, the empirical results also indicate that economic growth, trade openness and urbanisation contribute to the increase in CO₂ emissions.