How do we talk about climate?
An analysis of online news from 2015 to 2019
Has something changed in climate talk?
As investors in sustainability, we have felt a renewed energy over the last year. It feels as if the market is increasingly driven to tackle the problems of climate change.
However, we wondered if our conversations were indicative of a broader cultural shift. Is this just something we are hearing in our circles; or, has how we talk about climate issues as a society fundamentally changed?
To see, we examined a dataset of six million English-language news articles that mentioned climate or climate related issues. This dataset, provided by the GDelt project, included online articles from 2015 to early 2020.
Then, we compared the verbiage of articles from 2015 versus articles from 2019. And, we did indeed see some changes!
What words do we use to discuss climate change?
First, let’s visualize the most commonly used words in the articles, in 2015 vs. 2019.
You may be noticing some differences yourself, but it is difficult to see in this format, so let’s make it more explicit.
We took a list of all words that appeared in an article in 2015 or an article in 2019 (over 150K unique words!) and we calculated the frequency of each word appearing in each year’s worth of articles. Then, we looked at the words whose frequency changed the most from 2015 to 2019, both positively and negatively.
One theme jumps out to us. 2015 climate news was grounded in discussion. You have high-frequency words like “agreement”, “conference”, “talks”, and “summit”.
In contrast, 2019 climate language is grounded in action. You have words like “crisis”, “action”, “protest”, “activist”, and “strike” featuring prominently.
Based on word choice, we have moved from an era of discussion to an era of action.
How do we use these words?
However, we wanted to ensure that the frequency of these words was not simply capturing global events occurring at the time (for example, the Paris Agreement was signed in late 2015).
So, we applied a model called “Word2Vec” to the data, which identifies ‘similarity’ between words, based on usage in our specific text. Basically, it looks at a text naively, not understanding the meaning of any word, and looks for words that are used in similar contexts. This is a method to identify contextual meaning of certain words in our datasets. “How we use” words, versus just what words we use.
So, we looked at the words “climate”, “action”, and “venture” in both 2015 and 2019, to see how the usage of identical words changed.
Climate has shifted from being associated with a globally relevant change to a crisis requiring fast action.
Action has gone from being associated with solidarity to being associated with urgency.
Ventures have moved from being grants of capital toward manufacturers commercializing their products.
This analysis reflects the same sentiment as our prior analysis — we have moved into an era of urgent action led by commercially viable ventures.
What is the sentiment of the news articles?
Finally, we used a model to extract ‘sentiment’ from each article. Basically, this model evaluates whether it believes a set of text is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ (commonly used on things like reviews).
As can be seen in the table, we saw a small but meaningful growth in the articles considered “positive”. This 1.3% difference may not seem like much, but against ~1.4M articles in each year, that equates to about 17,000 more positive articles in 2019 than 2015. That’s almost 50 additional “positive” articles published each day!
And, we found this particularly compelling given the state of the political landscape in 2015 versus 2019, in terms of support for climate policies. Despite this relative lack of climate action from the government, we are increasingly positive when discussing climate change.
It’s time for action
Not all of our findings are encouraging — to point, it would be helpful if in 2019, there were more global agreements and discussions in the climate narrative.
But, we are encouraged, because we see a new wave of optimistic action rising as well, and we at G2VP are excited to partner with entrepreneurs building to solve the problems of climate change.