After the Paris Climate Conference (Conference of the Paris COP: 21), most developing countries face challenges to attain a sustainable economy and carbon neutrality targets with minimum CO2 emission. The next eleven (N-11) economies are in line with the global phenomena of environmental degradation; very few studies have analyzed the effects of green technology innovation on environmental degradation in N-11 countries. Therefore, the present study addresses the gap and examines green technology innovation and renewable energy with CO2 emission from 1980 to 2018. The present study considers all the issues related to panel data analysis, such as cross-sectional dependence, stationarity, heterogeneity in slope parameters, and structural break with advanced panel estimators. Moreover, the cross-sectional augmented autoregressive distributed lags (CS-ARDL) test results show the negative and significant impact of green technology innovation and renewable energy with CO2 emission in the long run. However, the short-run association of green technology innovation is not significant—further, the results endorsed by the robustness tests such as AMG and CCEMG. To reduce environmental deterioration in N-11 countries, governments are suggested implementing some policies to support green innovation technologies and renewable energy resources. •We examine the effect of green innovation and renewable energy on CO2 emissions.•We applied advance cross-sectional augmented autoregressive distributed lags.•Green technology innovation shows a negative impact on CO2 emissions.•Renewable energy also shows a negative impact on CO2 emissions.•Green technology innovation is not significant for CO2 emissions in the short run.