Quantifying the global and national dynamics of environmental Kuznets curve using Chebyshev distance in feature space

There is an unresolved imbroglio regarding whether the global environmental issues are approaching the verge of irrecoverability, endangering the viability of living species and humanity. While the concept of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is widely accepted in support for perpetual economic growth as the essential fuel for environmental sustainability, the contrasting evidence also designates industrialization and mass production as the principal cause of environmental deterioration. To date, despite its crucial significance in global policymaking, little has been done to quantify the dynamics of the EKC on a national and global level. Here, we introduce a quantification metric in a three-dimensional feature space of the available global panel data for annual CO2 emissions per capita, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and year. We propose the Chebyshev distance between the data points and the vertices of the cubic feature space as a metric for the national and global EKC. Based on our proposed methodology, we classify thirty countries with the greatest global cumulative CO2 emissions in five categories and further explain the dynamics of EKC in each category. Our results demonstrate that France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are aligned with the EKC hypothesis, but other countries are more consistent with non-EKC scenarios. We also show how Poland and Mexico have gone through constant economic growth without additional CO2 emissions. Lastly, we discuss the relative performance of countries on a global level according to our methodology and propose directions for future research.