The energy trilemma COP-out: accessibility is under-reported in international English-language media coverage of United Nations Climate Change Conferences

Media coverage plays a crucial role in shaping public understanding of energy challenges and climate policy; robustly monitoring the way that energy challenges are depicted in news media is therefore important for understanding progress on meeting climate change goals. This study employs corpus linguistics methodology to analyze global media representations of the energy trilemma - the balance between accessibility, security, and environmental sustainability - in coverage of UN Climate Change Conferences (COP21-COP27, 2015–2022). Analysis of 18,578 news articles (11.6 million words) from 12 countries reveals significant cross-national variation in trilemma coverage. Using a novel quantitative measure validated against human ratings, we found that sustainability dominated media discourse compared to security and accessibility. This ranking was observed in each nation, though there was also variation between countries and over time in the extent of coverage of each aspect of the trilemma. Notably, media coverage patterns diverged from objective energy policy indicators. The study highlights the advantages of such corpus linguistic analysis of news articles over both traditional qualitative analyses of language and quantitative, decontextualized language-analysis tools.