Environmental sustainability via green transportation: A case of the top 10 energy transition nations

Transportation is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, the apparent solution to this environmental degradation parameter is to green the transport sector to ensure environment-friendly vehicles' operation and avoid poisonous gases in different countries. In light of this context, we develop a green transportation index and scrutinize its role in the environmental degradation proxied by the ecological footprint in the case of the top 10 energy transition countries covering data from 1990 to 2018. We implement a novel and sophisticated econometric technique for data analysis, quantiles via moments, due to potential heterogeneity in the variables and panel units. Our results confirm a monotonic combative profile of green transportation on the ecological footprint in reducing environmental degradation. In addition, the control variables, i.e., innovation, domestic investment, and institutional quality, are conducive to conserving environmental quality by decreasing the ecological footprint. However, urbanization still increases the ecological footprint and environmental degradation in these economies. Our investigated results are robust across the DH panel causality test. Therefore, we propose some important policy implications regarding green transportation exploitation to ease the ecological footprint for a sustainable environment.