Our paper "Energy transition as the core of climate discourse: Mapping social representations in digital public debate" has been published, open access, in Energy Research & Social Science (Elsevier), written together with Michelangelo Misuraca and Maria Spano.
How do people talk about climate change online?
Climate change is a biophysical phenomenon, but the societal response to it unfolds mostly through energy transitions: the reorganisation of how energy is produced, distributed and consumed. Whether those transitions are accepted depends not only on technology, but also on how the public interprets them. Those interpretations are still poorly mapped.
Drawing on Social Representation Theory, we analysed 537,953 Reddit comments on climate change posted during 2025. The analysis relies on ThemeScope, the network-based method we recently introduced (and implemented in the themescopeR package), which combines community detection with a two-dimensional map of structural salience and lexical concreteness.
Energy at the centre
The results show a differentiated, hierarchically organised architecture of meaning. The theme Energy Transition and Political Economy of Decarbonisation emerges as the most materially grounded and structurally central domain: climate change is mostly discussed through infrastructures, markets, industrial strategy and energy security. Institutional politics, scientific legitimacy and moral-epistemic contestation form highly salient interpretative layers, while vulnerability narratives, geopolitical framings, media reflexivity and environmental monitoring occupy more peripheral or supporting positions.
Why it matters
Within this digital public, energy systems act as the main symbolic anchors through which broader institutional, ideological and societal tensions are interpreted. The policy implication is that the legitimacy of climate measures depends not only on their technological feasibility, but also on how well they resonate with these structurally central domains of meaning. By bringing together socio-technical transition theory and large-scale discourse mapping, the study offers a scalable framework to analyse how energy transitions are debated and legitimised.
It is also a nice confirmation that ThemeScope travels well beyond the case it was designed on. Many thanks to Michelangelo and Maria for another great piece of teamwork.
Cite: Misuraca, M., Spano, M., & D'Aniello, L. (2026). Energy transition as the core of climate discourse: Mapping social representations in digital public debate. Energy Research & Social Science, 140, 104945. DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2026.104945