Transition to renewable energy and environmental technologies: The role of economic policy uncertainty in top five polluted economies

The United Nations' “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs) express attention to climate action. Even though a considerable number of papers have targeted this issue, the literature on the top five, “China, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States” economies is uncommon. Therefore, this paper is targeted to examine the influence of renewable energy (RE), environmental technologies (ETs), and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on carbon emissions. By using the most recent data available from 1992 to 2020, results are estimated with robust econometric techniques, i. e. “cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) and augmented mean group (AMG)”. Findings reflect the harmful role of EPU. However, RE and ETs have a supportive role in the transition towards a sustainable environment. The findings are also strong in terms of policy implications for the top five polluters.