Energy transition as the core of climate discourse: Mapping social representations in digital public debate

Climate change governance increasingly unfolds through energy transitions, yet the symbolic conditions under which these transitions are publicly interpreted remain insufficiently mapped. This study examines the representation of climate change in digital discourse during 2025, focusing on the structural positioning of energy-related framings. Drawing on Social Representation Theory, we analyse 537,953 Reddit comments using ThemeScope, a network-based approach combining community detection with a two-dimensional mapping of structural salience and lexical concreteness. The results reveal a differentiated and hierarchically organised architecture of meaning. Energy Transition and Political Economy of Decarbonisation emerges as a materially grounded and structurally central domain, indicating that climate change is predominantly articulated through infrastructures, markets, industrial strategy, and energy security concerns. Institutional politics, scientific legitimacy, and moral-epistemic contestation constitute highly salient interpretative layers through which governance conflicts and expertise are negotiated. By contrast, vulnerability narratives, geopolitical framings, media reflexivity, and scientific–environmental monitoring occupy more peripheral or supporting positions within the communicative structure. These findings suggest that, within this Reddit-based digital public, climate discourse is organised around energy systems as primary symbolic anchors through which broader institutional, ideological, and societal tensions are interpreted. Policy legitimacy depends not only on technological feasibility but also on resonance with structurally central domains of meaning. By integrating socio-technical transition theory with large-scale discourse mapping, the study contributes a scalable framework for analysing the symbolic architecture within which energy transitions are debated and legitimised.