The aim of this article is to investigate the relationship between air pollution, economic growth, energy use, trade openness, foreign direct investment, and financial development in N‐11 countries data period from 1980 to 2018. For this purpose, it is adopted the Panel Vector Autoregression (PVAR) model for the estimation of the long and short‐run effects. The results suggest that although energy consumption and financial development have a negative impact on CO2 emissions, foreign direct investment leads to an increase in pollution. In addition, there is bidirectional causality between financial development and CO2 emissions and energy use, carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption, foreign direct investments and energy consumption, and financial development and energy consumption. In addition, there is unidirectional causality from carbon dioxide emissions to GDP, from energy consumption to GDP, from foreign direct investments to CO2 emissions and GDP, from financial development to GDP. Finally, impulse‐response functions indicate the validity of the EKC hypothesis in these countries.