Institutions affect environmental quality by enabling economic growth, supporting environmental protection policies, and regulating industries. In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of institutions on carbon emissions. Using the Generalized Methods of Moments and an unbalanced panel of 120 countries from 1984 to 2016, we examine the impact of institutional integrity on per capita carbon emissions and carbon intensity of energy use. We also explore the heterogeneous effect of institutions on carbon emissions across income groups and regions. Lastly, we examine the impact of disaggregated institutional quality factors on carbon emissions. Our results confirm the presence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve in the models with and without institutions. However, the marginal effect of GDP per capita on carbon emissions is lower in the models that account for institutional integrity than the models that do not. Therefore, carbon policies should account for economic growth as well as institutional contexts. The results also show that although the combined institutional integrity is an important determinant of carbon emissions, individual institutional factors in isolation have minor effects.