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The increasing human activities amidst competition for resources across the globe has made environmental challenges an ongoing classic problem, thus prompting policymakers to continually seek effective solution while ensuring sustainable development. With the wide coverage of the relevance of the double dividend hypothesis in explaining the co-benefit of environmental tax, there is a dearth of evidence in the literature to suggest that environmental tax offers green dividends for both the environment and agricultural practice in the European countries. As such, this study employed the more recent Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) alongside other approaches for Europe's largest agrarian economies (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) over the annual period 1995-2020. The investigation affirms the validity of the co-benefit of environmental tax as far as environmental sustainability and value-added to agriculture are concerned in this panel of 'Big Four' economies, thus motivating the countries to relentlessly pursue the carbon-neutral 2050 target. Moreover, the study aligns with the expectation that renewable energy utilization and population density are desirable factors for achieving a carbon-neutral target. Lastly, the findings suggest that environmental quality is attainable in the panel, especially as increasing income surpasses a certain threshold, thus validating the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Above all, the findings provide timely policy insight that accommodates both the environmental sustainability and food security framework of the European Union. The policy options relevant in light of the study's conclusions include that the decision makers in the selected agrarian economies should ramp up energy transition opportunities through a resilient environmental tax system that incentives availability of credit and investment financing in the agriculture sector., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

Based on the commitment to improve environmental quality across European Union under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and varying national goals, this study investigates the dynamic linkages between bureaucracy, socioeconomic factors, conventional fossil fuel energy consumption vis-à-vis aggregate fossil and disaggregate fossil (oil, coal, and gas) fuels and environmental quality in the panel of selected 25-EU nations for the period 1990-2017. The study employs relevant second-generation empirical method and unearth the following results: (1) inverted environmental Kuznets curve was validated while fossil fuel consumption has a deteriorating impact on environmental performance due to its positive effect on carbon emission; (2) fossil fuel energy consumption (both aggregate and it components) exerts a dampening impact on environmental performance due to its positive effect on carbon emission; (3) that direct effect of bureaucracy and socioeconomic factors promote environmental quality but the degree or magnitude of influence is significantly different between bureaucratic system and socioeconomic factor, and (4) the moderating or indirect impact of bureaucracy, socioeconomic on the environment via fossil fuel energy consumption is observed and significantly different across the model specification. Moreover, the result reveals a unidirectional causal relationship flows from GDP per capita, bureaucracy and socioeconomic factors to carbon emission, while bi-directional relationships between oil, gas and carbon emission are established. In policy direction, the study therefore recommend that the European Union member countries should further explore the opportunities in clean energy development in order to ameliorate the continent's environmental concerns. Furthermore, in the quest to scale up the bloc's energy transition, significant improvement in the countries' bureaucracy establishment and socioeconomic conditions could hasten the energy transition and efficiency policy while improving the environmental sustainability drive., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)