Reconciling energy justice and environmental degradation: the moderating role of renewable energy

Energy justice has emerged as a framework for understanding how energy systems distribute access, affordability, governance power, and the benefits and burdens associated with energy production and consumption. Yet its environmental implications remain insufficiently understood. This study examines whether energy justice contributes to or mitigates environmental degradation using an unbalanced panel of 69 countries from 2000 to 2022. Environmental degradation is measured through the ecological footprint, with CO2 emissions used as an alternative proxy. Using a dynamic two-step system GMM estimator, the results show that higher levels of energy justice are associated with greater environmental degradation. This points to an equity – sustainability trade-off, whereby gains in energy access and affordability may translate into higher consumption and greater environmental pressure when they are achieved through fossil-fuel-dependent energy systems. However, renewable energy deployment moderates this relationship by weakening the adverse environmental effect of energy justice. Additional analyses indicate that technological innovation and economic development reduce this trade-off, while threshold results suggest that the relationship may shift toward synergy once sufficient levels of renewable energy, innovation, and income are reached. The findings are robust to alternative measures of energy justice and environmental degradation, as well as to additional estimators addressing endogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. This study contributes to the literature by showing that energy justice is not automatically aligned with environmental sustainability. Rather, its ecological implications depend on the extent to which equity-oriented energy policies are combined with renewable energy expansion, technological innovation, and economic development that supports cleaner and more efficient energy systems.