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Bold actions are necessary to unlock the potential for economic empowerment by eradicating energy poverty (UN Sustainable Development Goal 7) by 2030. This will require a sustained commitment to significant levels of new investments. Delivering on the promise of universal energy access and improved life quality has eluded policy-makers and governments over the past seven decades. Affordability of energy services for every global citizen, spanning vastly diverse regions and local contexts, requires the development and massive diffusion of technologies that offer 'point-of-use' options combined with new business models. Social innovations and flexible governance approaches will also need to be integrated with technological advances. The scope and scale of developmental change span large-scale grid systems to decentralized distributed resources at community levels to the households. We recommend a global network of 'energy access innovation centers' dedicated to providing a dynamic 'extension service' that bolsters the entire supply chain of talent and expertise, design and operational requirements of system deployment and capacity to embed low-cost, high-performance next-generation technological solutions in the field. To meet the needs of those at the base of the economic and social pyramid, the dual challenges of economic development and transition to a low-carbon energy future make clean energy access the quintessential challenge of the 21st century.

Guiding technological progress towards clean innovations is crucial to industrial green transformation. This paper explains how clean technology innovation affects industrial green total factor productivity, using Tobit and panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) models to empirically test the relationship between clean technology innovation and industrial green total factor productivity. This research shows that clean technology innovation has a significantly positive effect on industrial green total factor productivity. The magnitude of this effect is different in various regions. When the intensity of environmental regulation reaches a particular threshold value in the central and western regions, clean technology innovation can significantly promote industrial green total factor productivity. In the eastern region, however, strict environmental regulation inhibits the promotion effect of clean technology innovation on industrial green total factor productivity. The corresponding research conclusion provide theoretical support and empirical evidence for exploring the way of industrial green transformation.

Green finance, clean technology innovation (CTI), and environmental tax are all eco-friendly measures for diminishing environmental degradation. Few studies have examined how these variables work together to realize the object of green growth (GG). Therefore, this research aims to examine the role of the above factors in achieving GG by using 28 developed countries from 1995 to 2019. These countries have passed over a time of fast progress at the expense of heavy pollution and hence have moved their emphasis to GG. This paper starts with the construction of the GG index based on entropy-weighted TOPSIS, followed by pooled OLS, fixed effect, random effect, the two-step least-square estimator (2SLS), and the System GMM models for hypothesis testing. From the findings, it is obsense of that: (1) Green finance positively affects GG; the higher the levels of GG, the greater the enhancement of green finance on GG. (2) CTI favorably mediates the impact of green finance on GG, and the mediating effect accounts for 14.06% of the overall effect. (3) Environmental tax has a significant threshold effect on the link between green finance and CTI; when high levels of environmental taxes are maintained, the influence of green finance on enterprises' CTI is greatly strengthened, with an increase of 53%. GG will be further promoted by the advancement of enterprises' CTI. Finally, emerging counties would benefit from this study in designing frameworks of green finance, environmental tax, and CTI policies to achieve GG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identifies the impact of green supply chain management (GSCM) on clean technology innovation (CTI) by enterprises in China as well as compares the effects of forward and backward GSCM and the differences by industry and home country. The effect of CTI on GSCM is tested by 501 samples of mostly multinational enterprises in China from 2014 to 2016. The results indicate that CTI benefits from GSCM, which remains robust to a series of sensitivity test. And different management directions show great differences, where the backward GSCM has a stronger promotion effect on CTI than the forward GSCM. Moreover, light polluting industries and capital-intensive industries have stronger incentives to adopt GSCM than heavy-polluting industries and labour-intensive industries. And domestic companies perform better than foreign companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]