The balance between economic growth and environmental protection has been the core concern of policy makers in developing countries for the past two decades. This study is one of the few studies to empirically inspect the relationship between economic growth, FDI, and energy consumption over the period 1978-2010 in China. The results reveal that there is a unidirectional Granger causality running from GDP to energy consumption. This suggests that increase of GDP will consume more energy and implementing of the energy conservation policies and energy demand management policies in China may not have negative impact on economic growth. Besides, a bi-directional Granger causality has been found between energy consumption and FDI. This implies that Chinese government should cautiously evaluate the positive and negative effects of FDI inflows and put efforts into making more effective control policies on environmental protection.

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Targeting at students randomly selected across all departments and all years at one university located in northern Taiwan, this research based on hierarchical regression analysis aims to investigate whether or not global warming awareness education exerts a positive effect on research participants’ energy-saving cognition and attitude. the results indicate that the 8 hypotheses proposed are all supported. Firstly, green education courses and global warming awareness videos have significantly positive impact on participants’ cognition and attitude as compare to their peers who did not take the courses or view the videos. Secondly, the participants’ scientific literacy positively influences their energy-saving cognition, which in turn positively impacts on energy-saving attitude. Furthermore, energy-saving cognition plays a completely intermediate role between scientific literacy and energy-saving attitude. Results mentioned conclude the contributions of this research.

Energy consumption (EC) can be seen as a two-edged sword. It can be not only essential for sustaining good standards of living but also in hindering environmental protection. Consequently, what is the causal relationship between welfare variables and energy consumption in different economies has become one of the focal issues for both policy makers and researchers. The aim of this study attempts to investigate the causal relationship between economic growth (EG), foreign direct investment (FDI), remittances (RMTs), human development index (HDI), and EC using annual data from 1981 to 2011 through multivariate Granger causality tests for Ecuador and Mexico. The empirical analysis indicates that for Ecuador, in the long run, there are unidirectional causalities flowing from FDI, HDI, and RMTs to EC. For Mexico, there is no evidence of any welfare variable flowing to EC but there are unidirectional causalities running from EC to RMTs, HDI to FDI, and FDI to GDP all in the long run. With this information, we suggest policy makers of these two countries, especially for Ecuador, to strongly advocate energy-saving concepts to the public and actively implement more infrastructure projects related to health and education, provide incentives for international advanced green technology transformation, and liberalize international remittances.