The relationship between CO2, emission and energy consumption for different development countries

Abstract

In recent years, CO2 emission has already been worldly deemed as the major cause of global warming. However, energy consumption, especially of fossil fuel, makes a huge contribution to the rise of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. To slow down global warming, the ideas of renewable energy, low-carbon industry, and energy conservation have been promoted worldwide. On the other hand, developing or least-developed countries with the view to national economic growth tend to use cheap and unclean energy and develop high-polluted industries, which may ignore global sustainable development. This paper aims to discover the influence of energy consumption on CO2 emission for countries on three levels- developed countries, developing countries, and least-developed countries. The study adopted the statistics of the population, energy consumption, and GDP for 137 countries for 2006 from International Energy Agency (IEA) website. Then the countries will be grouped into three different development levels on the World Trade Center's (WTO) definitions. Next, the investigation applied Analysis of Variance for difference test and Scheffe method for post means comparison. At last, according to the empirical results, the study would further analyze the energy efficiency, the industrial types, and the application of renewable energy among the different levels of countries. Moreover, some managerial implications would also be brought up for the authorities.