The study explores the association between economic complexity, globalization, renewable and non-renewable energy consumption on the ecological footprint in the case of India from 1990–2018. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) is applied to measure the long-run elasticity, while the vector error correction model (VECM) is applied to classify the causal path. The empirical findings demonstrate that economic complexity, globalization process, and renewable energy consumption play a dominant role in minimizing environmental degradation. In contrast, economic growth and non-renewable energy consumption are more responsible for increasing the pollution level in both the short and long run. Furthermore, the VECM outcomes disclose that there is long-run causality between ecological footprint and economic complexity. Moreover, the empirical outcomes are robust to various robustness checks performed for analysis to the consistency of our main results. The Indian government/policymakers should encourage a more environmentally friendly production process and eco-friendly technologies in exports to minimize environmental degradation.