The internet has revolutionized the pattern of economic growth and its environmental effects. We investigate the ways in which internet penetration influences the relationship between income and the environment using data from 1996 to 2014 on CO₂ emissions from 115 countries with multiple levels of per capita GDP and internet penetration. Empirical results document the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and reveal that internet penetration does generally reduce the actual income level beyond which pollution begins to decrease. Further tests, based on the division of income and period, indicate an increasing negative influence of internet penetration on emissions reduction, with income growth and the environmental effect of the internet evolving from direct and indirect to systemic. We discuss this study’s contributions to further research on income-environment paths and implications for the role of the internet in emissions reduction.

Since China’s central authority began enforcing the environmental target responsibility system and introduced environmental indicators to the official ranking tournament in 2007, an ecological transformation has emerged in the intergovernmental competition (IGC) among localities. Because the extant literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) remains unclear regarding how that ecological IGC transformation changes the EKC economy–pollution correlation, this research investigates the degree to which the transformed IGC changes the form of the EKC, and how that altered EKC varies for different pollutants (i.e., SO₂ and CO₂) and in different regions (i.e., the eastern, central, and western regions). The results demonstrate a consistently inverted U-shaped relationship between income and SO₂ emissions in all three regions, whereas when CO₂ emissions are taken as the pollution indicator, the EKC hypothesis holds only in the eastern and central cities, and a positive linear income–CO₂ nexus is found in the western region. Spatial analysis reveals that whereas the IGC flattens the inverted U-shaped curves between income and SO₂ emissions, it has led to a higher economic cost, corresponding to the turning point of the EKC for CO₂ emissions. The findings indicate that the ecological transformation of the IGC has facilitated a positive up–down yardstick competition in the strategic interactions of sustainable development across local Chinese governments, which can lead to a kind of balance between centralization and decentralization by inspiring local officials’ adaptability and activity in reducing pollutant emissions and strengthening the officials’ responsiveness to performance rankings. This study elucidates the environmental impacts of IGC in China and provides an institutional explanation for the strategic interactions among local governments when they are tackling the environment–economy nexus under multitask conditions.