Are renewable energy resources, oil price, and trade openness helping France achieve its environmental targets? Evidence from an asymmetric analysis

The purpose of the present investigation is to scrutinize the impacts of green energy technologies, trade, the per capita income, and oil price on the carbon dioxide emissions and ecological footprint in France over the 1980/2022 period. Therefore, to achieve this objective, the Non-linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) approach is employed.

In fact, the obtained results showed that renewable energy is a contributor to the improvement of the French environment. In fact, a positive shock to renewable energy alleviates both the CO₂ emissions and the ecological footprint. Moreover, an upsurge in oil prices reduces the CO₂ emissions while their reduction enhances the ecological footprint. On the other hand, trade is proven to have a negative effect on the environmental damage. Furthermore, a positive variation in the GDP per capita exerts a positive upshot on the CO₂ emissions and ecological footprint, in the long run, whereas, a negative shock to the GDP per capita has a negative impact on the carbon dioxide emissions. Finally, a robustness check analysis is added using quantile regression (QR) in order to explore the effects of positive and negative variations of the different explanatory variables.

In fact, referring to these results, some strategic directions are proposed in order to decarbonize the French economy. Therefore, diversifying the electricity mix by introducing more renewable energies should be a priority. On the other hand, in order to avoid an increase of the State's energy bill in the event of an increase of the oil prices, it is important to reduce oil imports by increasing energy production from renewable sources such as hydraulic, solar, and wind energies.