## 6 Discussion and Conclusions
By employing the same proxy of internet usage and based on a panel dataset, [PERSON] et al. also found that internet usage could not reduce CO\({}_{2}\) emissions in 31 OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries for the time period 1991-2012 [42]. Therefore, \"internet for ecological sustainability\" should be a new guidance principle when developed countries design internet businesses and industries. Education was not an independent and significant influencing factor of ecological consumption for all three samples. The attitude-behavior gap still exists and prevents ecological awareness from being turned into real and specific ecologically friendly actions. The estimated results remind us that the ecological education we need in the \"full world\" and Anthropocene does not only have to do with \"knowing\" but also with \"doing\". It is hoped that individuals with higher education levels would become the pioneers on living and promoting ecologically sustainable lives. By employing income as the most important control variable, this paper enriches the long-lasting discussions on the EKC hypothesis and validates three kinds of relationships between ecological consumption and income. For all sample countries, income was a significant factor of increasing ecological consumption, and higher income was not the solution to ecological degradation. For the developing countries, the turning point value of GNIPC of the U-shaped curve was 706, and 95% of the observations were on the right side of the U-shaped curve, which means that, after a very early development stage, ecological consumption began increasing along with further increases in income levels. To our delight, the EKC hypothesis was valid in the developed countries. A positive relationship between ecological consumption and income was significantly reversed when GNIPC values approximately reached 39,014. For the developed countries, because only 15% of the observations were on the right side of the inversed U-shaped curve, more timely and effective measures should be taken to decouple income from ecological consumption and accelerate the arrival of the turning point of the inversed U-shaped curve, which would stimulate developing countries to make corresponding changes and help reduce global ecological consumption by much larger extents. Much more work needs to be conducted to improve our empirical analysis and further deepen the research context. Because the variables in this paper are defined generally, future research should explore different definitions of the variables, which would give us different perspectives of exploring the influencing factors of ecological consumption. The data quality should also be improved. For example, cultural differences may affect the uniformity of the data in different countries, especially in developed and developing countries. A major drawback of the regression estimations is that we did not find instrumental variables of the influencing factors, especially the instrumental variables of urbanization and internet usage, to conduct sensitivity analyses of the estimation results. Although panel regressions were used to conduct the estimations and lagged impacts were estimated to serve as robust checks for the regression results, the causal relationships between the influencing factors and ecological consumption could not be validated. Additionally, because the regression estimations were on a global level, it was difficult to provide specific measures to reduce ecological consumption of individual countries. Future research can try to combine estimations of global and national levels. More control variables, for example, political institutional quality and inequality, could be included in the panel regressions in order to refine the estimations. More importantly, the estimated results need further explanation. For example, why the negative impacts of renewable energy consumption and service industries are much stronger in developed countries than in developing countries needs to be explored.