The aim of this research is to determine if environmental taxes have an effect on economic growth. Recently there has been much debate over whether a double dividend exists with regard to the use of environmental taxes, whereby not only do they reduce pollution but the revenue gained can then be used to reduce distortionary taxes, giving an increase to economic growth. The simple economic growth model, also includes the usual control variables such as investment. The model further incorporates a variable measuring the levels of renewable energy in each country, which can be interpreted as a measure of the fiscal expenditure on the environment. The data used in the study is from Eurostat and includes all the countries of the EU, for which sufficient data is available, as well as Norway. This includes some of the transition economies which have recently joined the EU. The data spans 11 years in all and there are a total of 24 countries in the panel. However to account for the business cycle, only 3 observations are used for the variables, with the standard 5 year interval between each observation. A panel data model is used, with random effects favoured over fixed effects. The tax variables are expressed as a percentage of GDP and the renewable energy is expressed as a percentage of total electricity production. The results suggest that environmental taxes in general have a negative and significant effect on economic growth in the EU, suggesting that there is no evidence of a double dividend and that environmental taxes act in a distortionary way, as with labour or capital taxes. Renewable energy also has a significant and negative effect on economic growth, such that increased use of renewable energy reduces economic growth. This supports other studies that have found a negative relationship between a countries general energy resources and growth. The results also show that the effects are only significant when other distortionary taxes are included in the model, this accords with much of the theoretical modelling which suggested the effects of environmental taxes depends on the tax structure of a particular economy.