From the climate crisis to soaring energy costs, new research by Dr Yingnian Tao from Lancaster’s Psychology Department and Dr Mark Ryan from the Management School reveals how differently the UK press frames the green energy transition, with the study finding that left-leaning and right-leaning newspapers differ in how they engage with the issue.

In September 2024, the UK became the first Western country to discontinue coal production. By the first quarter of 2026, renewable energy accounted for 53.1% of the UK’s total electricity generation, with wind, bioenergy, and solar the three largest renewable sources.

The green energy transition is widely regarded as important for improving climate and ecological outcomes, enhancing energy security, and reducing exposure to volatile energy markets. It is also a matter of energy justice, requiring access to safe and affordable energy for communities. Given these far-reaching implications, the transition has become an increasingly prominent and politically contested topic in the media.

In their paper, ‘Environmental or economic crisis: A multi-method analysis of green energy transition in left- and right-leaning UK newspapers 2015-2024’, the researchers set out to explore how UK newspapers report on the green energy transition, with a particular focus on the use of strong positive and negative emotion words and how these contribute to different representations across the political spectrum. They analysed more than 3,000 articles from ten UK newspapers (five left-leaning and five right-leaning) published between 2015 and 2024. Using sentiment analysis alongside detailed corpus-assisted discourse analysis of language and themes, they examined five groups of strong emotion words: crisis, damage, greenwashing, catastrophe, and wealth.

Coverage of the energy transition increased across both political groups, particularly from 2020 onwards, although left-leaning newspapers consistently published more articles. The study also found a clear divergence in the threat narratives presented by the two groups, broadly following environmental degradation versus economic hardship.

In left-leaning coverage, 74.5% of uses of the word ‘crisis’ were associated with climate, frequently connecting climate change with fossil fuels and highlighting impacts such as rising temperatures and extreme weather, and using terms such as ‘catastrophe’ and ‘damage’ to create a sense of urgency. Coverage also called for interventions such as windfall taxes on oil companies and a transition towards renewable energy, highlighting the responsibility of wealthy, high-emitting nations and fossil fuel companies for climate-related harms.

Conversely, ‘damage’ in right-leaning coverage was more often associated with economic harm - such as threats to jobs or prosperity - particularly during the cost-of-living crisis. Catastrophe-related terms only appeared at a rate of 52.35 per million tokens in right-leaning coverage (compared with 175.43 in left-leaning coverage) and fossil fuels were more frequently framed as supporting energy security and economic stability.

The researchers also found a marked difference in coverage of ‘greenwashing’, with 149 instances in left-leaning newspapers compared with 39 in right-leaning newspapers. Left-leaning coverage more often presented greenwashing as harmful and called for regulation, while the issue received considerably less attention in right-leaning coverage.

Despite these differences, the researchers identify a common thread across the political spectrum. The coverage largely adopts a techno-optimist, business-as-usual approach. Neither side substantially challenges existing patterns of consumption, while alternatives such as behavioural or lifestyle change and degrowth receive little attention. Instead, technological innovation is generally presented as the main route towards addressing environmental problems, suggesting that some assumptions about the transition are shared across the political divide.

Ultimately, understanding how the media frames the green energy transition matters because these narratives can shape public perceptions of the challenges, responsibilities, and solutions involved, with important implications for media practice and policymaking.

“Environmental and economic concerns are two sides of the same coin, really”, said Dr Yingnian Tao. “Transition policies need to address environmental impacts while weighing the costs and benefits felt by ordinary people. We hope more integrated news coverage of these trade-offs will help overcome barriers to the transition.”

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acorp.2026.100241