An empirical approach to the nexus between natural resources and environmental pollution: Do economic policy and environmental-related technologies make any difference?

The outlooks for the interactions between natural resource rent, economic growth, and environmental pollution are widely debated in the literature but not well understood in the context of policy uncertainty and environmental technologies. Therefore, this study empirically explores nexus between natural resource rent, economic policy uncertainty, economic growth, globalization, environmental-related technologies, and CO2 emissions in the United States between 1985 and 2020. The study employed dynamic Auto-Regressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) simulation and Kernel-based Regularized Least Squares (KRLS) techniques. The long-run regression outputs validate that environmental-related technologies are helpful in pollution reduction and improve environmental quality significantly. However, the increase in globalization tends to lead to environmental degradation. Furthermore, results reveal that the rise of natural resource rent contributes to carbon emissions, suggesting that an excessive dependency on natural resource rent disturbs ecological sustainability in the United States. Results indicate that environmental-related technologies should be encouraged, and more stability in economic policies can be suitable choices in fighting against climate change. New policy insights are further discussed in the paper.