Do nuclear and renewable energy improve the environment? Empirical evidence from the United States

The central focus of this article is to assess the dynamic effects of nuclear and renewable energy consumption on CO2 emissions, for a given level of income and energy consumption. We apply an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration to U.S. data from 1960 to 2010. We find that nuclear energy consumption indeed reduces CO2 emissions in both the short- and long-run, while renewable energy consumption does only in the short-run. We also find that income increases CO2 emissions in the long-run after showing the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) initially in the short-run. Finally, energy consumption is found to have a negative impact on reducing CO2 emissions in the short- and long-run.