Biomass Energy Impact On The Transportation Sector: With the global concerns raised on CO2 emissions dynamics, the demand for clean energy sources seems to have increased globally.
The reason for this is hinged on the perspective that the introduction of clean energy sources can reduce CO2 emissions by at least 0.4 billion tons in the year 2020.
In this context, it is noteworthy that biomass energy is one of the most important renewable energy sources and happens to be more attractive than other forms of renewable energy.
The biomass energy source is a type of cleaner renewable energy that is capable of reducing pollution.
However, this assertion is a contradictory one. For example, some studies revealed that biomass energy reduces CO2 emissions while others prove biomass energy replicates the role of fossil fuels by growing the CO2 emissions.
Meanwhile, the majority of the studies focus on examining the role of energy consumption in carbon abatement strategies, but the trend of CO2 emissions in the transportation sector is less studied.
For example, used time-series data from 1960 to 2008 to explore the two-way long-term relationship between energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the road transportation
sector of OECD countries.
Xu and Lin (2018) studied the drivers (population, economic growth, energy intensity, urbanization, freight and passenger transportation) of CO2 emissions in the transportation sector for China.
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Solaymani (2019) analyzed the CO2 emissions of the seven major transportation carbon emitters (the USA, China, India, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and Canada) and found the USA and China are the main contributors to transportation CO2 emissions.
Recently, Georgatzi et al. (2020) investigated the possible determinants of CO2 emissions caused by the activities of transportation sector in 12 European countries from 1994 to 2014.
In particular, none of the aforementioned studies consider the CO2 emissions from biomass energy, even though about 5 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of total primary energy use in the USA is from biomass source.
Moreover, the study of Aslan (2016) showed that biomass energy consumption could lead to the increase of economic growth in the USA, and if so, more biomass energy can be used in the future.
Thus, it is vital to incorporate biomass energy consumption during the examination of CO2 emissions in the transportation sector, which is the main motivation of this article.
Based on the above motivation, this study largely contributes to the literature in several ways.
Firstly, the selection of the USA’s transportation sector is hinged on the fact that this sector is the largest emitter of carbon, and until now, studies in this context are sparse.
The USA’s transportation sector consumes a large amount of energy. This need for energy consumption is inspired by its massive population of 328.2 million, with real GDP per capita $65,223.
In the USA, The average budget for households in 2018 was approximately 60,000 dollars, and after this staggering figure, the next big expenditure of 9800 dollars (16%) was allotted to the transportation sector.
For this reason, this study aims to provide a valuable policy directive on the country’s transportation system, and at the same time, it offers an important lesson for a global outlook on how to tackle this issue and maintain a sustainable living.
Secondly, this study aims to provide a breakthrough in the efforts to underpin the biomass energy consumption and CO2 nexus, and also highlights the relevance of the biomass energy portfolio to the transportation sector in the USA.
In this regard, the potential impact of the transportation sector on environmental sustainability is uniquely put forward in this study.
Lastly, the FMOLS, DOLS, and CCR measures are applied to study the long-term effects of the main influencing factors of CO2 emissions in the USA transportation sector.
These approaches remove the endogenous problem of cointegration regressors, and additionally, they minimize the problems that stem from the long-term association between the equation of cointegration and the changes in stochastic regression.
Among the key policymakers and governments, there have been discussions regarding the existence of a positive or negative relationship between variables.
These considerations can lead to the strengthening of the transportation sector by exploring innovative technologies that especially focus on environmental sustainability in the USA.
