AI coverage 1, Climate coverage 0
In comparison to AI, climate change barely received any media coverage as of late.
At the start of the year I took a quick look at climate change and AI in media coverage. At the time, I had the sense that everyone I knew was talking about AI (even people who did not work on it) and it seemed like climate change had fallen by the wayside, despite the urgency of the threat of a rapidly warming planet. The data at the time (see graphic above) suggested that this impression was more than just a feeling.
Using Media Cloud, an open-source platform for media analysis, I compared how 1,600+ English-language news media mention AI versus climate change. While AI coverage surged in 2025, climate change barely broke through. In light of the current heatwave gripping the UK and the rest of Europe, I ran the same search again for January 2025 to June 2026 and…well, not much has changed really. Any coverage of AI consistently hovered around the 10% mark according to MediaCloud data of 1,600+ English-language news media. Coverage of climate change was more around 2% of all stories.
AI and climate change are often framed as conflicting stories, and there have been hot debates about the climate impact of the infrastructure required to run AI systems. The news media could indeed play an important role in helping the public make sense of these often competing narratives about AI and climate change. However, when I tried to identify all stories mentioning both “AI” and “climate change”, the share of such stories was so small (about 0.05% of all stories in the MediaCloud dataset for January 2025 to June 2026) that it didn’t show up as anything other than a flat line that was indistinguishable from the X-axis.
This might also help explain a finding from this recent report by my colleague Waqas Ejaz and others. Across eight countries, only about one in three respondents thought the news media did a good job in explaining how AI can be used to tackle climate change (35%), investigate its impact (36%), provide balanced coverage of risks and benefits (35%), and highlight solutions (35%). However, there is a wide variance between countries.
Why am I re-upping this? Well, my flat currently is nice and toasty at about 26 degrees and the next couple of days are going to be nice and warm infernal in Oxford. And as much as I am personally and professionally fascinated by AI, it progress and societal impact, I do find it baffling that climate change coverage has pretty much dropped out of the news.