A Look at the EU Countries’ Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Turkey's Sustainable Industrial Growth

The relationship between energy and sustainable economic growth has always been close. Sustainable industrial growth has a strong focus on greening industry through six priority action lines, including technologies for clean production, bio-based product markets and sustainable raw material use. In this context, the environmental industry has been identified as one of the most promising areas of specialization and green technologies are at the core of the areas which should lay the foundation of the new industrial revolution in the European Union. Renewable energy, nowadays also used as alternative energy, is the new phenomenon on the way for sustainable industrial development and for an environmentally integrated energy policy. It is also the most probable way for the EU countries to meet their Kyoto targets when producing energy. Most environmental technology investment projects come from the renewable energy industry, followed by the industrial machinery industry, the electronic components industry and the turbines and engines industry. The EU is a major host of green technology projects with a share of 46% in 2011. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy use in Turkey is expected to double over the next decade, while electricity demand growth is expected to increase at an even faster pace. Meeting this level of growth will require significant industrial investment in the renewable energy sector, much of which will come from the private sector. Recently, renewable energy awareness has made great strides both in the EU and Turkey. Therefore, the import-substitution development strategy followed up to 1980 was designed to make Turkey an independent producer of manufactured goods. Meanwhile, one of the potential negative sides of industrialization in Turkey would be significant increase in CO2 emissions. Finally, the main objective of the paper is to investigate how to allocate sustainable industrial sources to effectively meet targets of environmental protection in the EU and its candidate member Turkey.