Among the new revelation in the natural resources-environment and climate change nexus literature is the criticality of ascending the environmental sustainability ladders of the industrialized economies such as the newly industrialized countries (NICs). This study considers the panel of top ten NICs (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand) by utilizing the novel Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) and other approaches including the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FM-OLS), Dynamic Ordinary Least Square (D-OLS), and the Fixed-effects Ordinary Least Square (FE-OLS) to analyze the related dataset between 1990 and 2018. The combined empirical approaches help to measure the countries’ drive for carbon neutrality. With a startling and unanimous evidence from the employed empirical techniques, natural resource rent is detrimental to the global goal carbon neutrality in the examined panel countries. However, there is a significant relieve that is brought about when globalization moderate the effect of natural resource rent on carbon emission. Another favorable outlook from the study is that economic growth and environmental nexus yields the affirmative validity of environmental Kuznets curve while renewable energy utilization and globalization independently promotes environmental quality in the examined panel countries. Therefore, the result from the study favours a more relaxed border to allow international integration of economic and financial aspects especially for the natural resources-related and environmental-friendly goods and services. Display omitted •There is long-run effects of natural resource, globalization, renewable energy, economic growth and environmental quality in newly industrialized countries.•International integration of natural resources help improves environmental quality.•Independently, renewable energy decrease CO2 emissions while natural resource acts otherwise.•FMOLS, DOLS, and FE-OLS validated the EKC and Pollution Hallo hypotheses.•We controlled for distributional heterogeneity using novel Method of Moments Quantile Regression.