The effectiveness of environmental technologies in combating climate change: a cross National Analysis

Previous research finds a mixed relationship between environmental outcomes and technology. Despite this growing focus on technology’s capacity to mitigate environmental harms, less work has examined the impact that governance may have on such outcomes. To fill this gap in the literature, we use two-way fixed-effects (FE) linear regression with an AR(1) disturbance and Generalized Least Squares (GLS) estimation with Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) to test if higher levels of environment-related technologies (inventions per capita) are related to increased or decreased carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions (metric tons per capita) cross-nationally for 113 nations from 2000 to 2014. Initially, we find that environment-related technologies have an inconsistent impact on CO₂ emissions. However, we respecify the model to include an interaction term between environmental technologies and corruption to determine if corruption moderates this relationship. We find support for this hypothesis with environmental technologies decreasing CO₂ emissions in nations with lower levels rather than higher levels of corruption. Drawing on these findings, we argue that it is important for researchers to consider how internal governance structures shape environmental technology’s impact on the natural environment.