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A major challenge for humans in the twenty-first century is devising a way to minimize environmental pollution while fostering economic growth that will not deplete the planet's resources. Despite increased awareness of climate change and efforts to combat it, the amount of pollution emissions on the Earth continues to drop significantly. This study employs cutting-edge econometric methods to examine the long- and short-term asymmetric and causal impacts of renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and financial development on CO2 emissions in India at both aggregate and disaggregated levels. Thus, this work fills a significant gap in research. A time series from 1965 to 2020 was used for this study. Wavelet coherence was employed to investigate causal effects among the variables, while the NARDL model addressed long-run and short-run asymmetry effects. Our findings indicate that (i) REC, NREC, FD, and CO2 emissions are all interconnected in the long run, (ii) NREC and FD significantly trigger CO2 emissions in India in the long run, and (iii) the results of a wavelet coherence-based causality test support the long-term estimates of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • Abundant low-grade sub-bituminous coal is converted to valuable activated carbon. • Eco-friendly ultrasonic-assisted thermochemical activation process is described. • The coal-derived activated carbon possesses highly enriched surface properties. • The activated carbon delivered excellent performance as supercapacitor electrode. The subbituminous type of coal is considered low-grade and unsuitable for power generation due to its low calorific value and high impurity content. As a result, this type of coal does not have any economic value and so is mostly lying unutilized. In this work, we have explored a simple and easily scalable approach to converting this low-grade subbituminous coal, abundantly found in the North-Eastern region (NER) of India, to valuable porous activated carbon material with the target of its potential use as electrode material in electrochemical energy storage. The synthesis process follows an environmentally friendly method, which includes ultrasonication-aided H 2 O 2 oxidation of the raw coal and subsequent thermochemical activation with KOH. Through variation of KOH ratio and pyrolysis temperature, the optimized coal-derived activated carbon was found to exhibit the maximum specific surface area and pore volume of 1021 m2/g and 0.52 cm3/g respectively. When tested as electrode material for symmetric supercapacitor cells, this activated carbon delivers a high specific capacitance of 227 and 99 F/g at 0.5 A/g current density in aqueous and organic electrolytes respectively. Moreover, it shows excellent capacity retention of 82% at 5 A/g current density after 10,000 charge–discharge cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]