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This study seeks to address pertinent economic and environmental issues associated with natural gas flaring, especially for the world's leading natural gas flaring economies (i.e. Russia, Iraq, Iran, the United States, Algeria, Venezuela, and Nigeria). By applying relevant empirical panel and country-specific approaches, the study found that fuel energy export positively impacts economic growth with elasticity of ~ 0.22 to ~ 0.24 for the panel examination. It is further revealed that environmental quality in the panel is hampered by increase in economic growth, gas flaring, fuel energy export, and urbanization. Moreover, for the country-wise inference, government quality desirably moderates economic and environmental aspects of gas flaring in Venezuela and Nigeria, and in Russia and Iran respectively. However, government quality moderates gas flaring to cause economic downturn in the USA. Additionally, economic growth increased with increase in urbanisation (in Iraq and the USA), gas flaring (in Iran and the USA), government quality (only in the USA), and fuel energy export (only in Algeria) while economic growth downturn is due to increase urbanisation in Russia and the USA, increase in fuel energy export in the USA, and increase in government quality in Russia. Meanwhile, environmental quality is worsened through intense carbon dioxide emission from increased urbanisation activity (in Iraq, Iran, Algeria, and Nigeria), increased fuel energy export (in Nigeria), increased natural gas flaring (in Algeria and Nigeria), increased GDP (in Russia, Iran, USA, Algeria, and Venezuela), and high government quality (in Iran). Interestingly, the result revealed that increase in GDP (in Nigeria), increase in urbanisation (in the USA), and increase in gas flaring (in Algeria and Nigeria) dampens environmental quality. Importantly, this study offers policy insight into sustainable approaches in natural gas production, government effectiveness, and regulatory quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments often impose new energy strategies to support new CO2 emission‐reducing technologies without affecting economic growth. Hence, this study aims to re‐investigate the relationship between economic growth, renewable energy use, and CO2 emissions in Algeria from 1990 to 2018. Motivated by the mixed findings of the existing literature, which ignore the Fourier function and bootstrap test and apply the newly developed Fourier bootstrap autoregressive distributed lag model (FARDL). Our findings indicate that renewable energy use and growth have a long‐run relationship with CO2 emissions and do not accept the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis for CO2 emissions in Algeria. In the long term, the results show that renewable energy use has a negative and significant impact, and growth has a positive and statistically significant effect on CO2 emissions. In the short run, the findings indicate that renewable energy use reduces CO2 emissions, while both the growth and squared growth had positive and statistically insignificant impacts on CO2 emissions, confirming the lack of evidence supporting the EKC hypothesis. Moreover, the causality test indicates a one‐way causation from growth to renewable energy use, confirming the conservation hypothesis for Algeria and from growth to CO2 emissions. Interestingly, we found one‐way causality from CO2 emissions to renewable energy use, attributing this to the fact that renewable energy usage has yet to reach a point that it can significantly cause a CO2 emissions reduction. Based on the results, we recommend that policymakers design appropriate policies to decarbonize energy consumption, e.g., increasing fossil fuel costs and implementing a carbon tax. In contrast, Algeria should promote new CO2 emission‐reducing technologies without affecting economic growth, e.g., tax exemptions and reductions for enterprise owners in the renewable energy industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]