Sustainable pathways: Decoding the interplay of renewable energy, economic policy uncertainty, infrastructure, and innovation on transport CO2 in QUAD economies

The current study scrutinized the asymmetric effect of transport infrastructure, renew-able energy consumption, technological innovation, and economic policy uncertainty on transport CO2 emissions in QUAD countries (Australia, Japan, India, and the United States) from 1995 to 2022. The panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (PNARDL) technique suggests that the positive change of renewable energy consumption and technology innovation has a positive and significant relationship with transport carbon dioxide emissions. The negative shock of renewable energy consumption has a negative and insignificant association with CO2 emissions. At the same time, the negative shock of technology innovation has a negative and significant association with transport CO2. The result designates that the positive change of economic policy uncertainty has a negative and significant link to transport CO2 emissions. The negative shock of policy uncertainty has a significant negative link with transport carbon dioxide emissions. However, the findings showed that the linkage between positive transport infrastructure and energy consumption shock to positive and transport CO2 emissions and negative transport infrastructure and renewable energy consumption shock to negative TCO2 emissions are unidirectional. Innovation and renewable energy have the potential to improve the environment; however, achieving this requires strategic policy alignment and robust transport infrastructure.