The next panel at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on polarisation around climate change, and starts with my colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. She begins by outlining recent developments in climate policy in Australia, and especially the discussions and disinformation about net zero policy, renewable energies, and the role of nuclear power in the energy mix.
Carly engaged in an LLM-assisted discourse analysis of submissions to the Australian federal parliament’s recent inquiry into nuclear power; she worked with the Claude LLM to code the submitters and their stances, the claims about nuclear and other energy sources being made, and the evidence provided for any of these claims; this was the input to her discourse analysis and the mapping of coalitions and oppositions within the discourse network.
There was a clear division between pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear submissions, with several typical claims being made on the two sides; some claims were also used by both sides, though with different emphases. Evidence use was highly divergent across the two sides; the anti-nuclear cluster drew strongly on data from the CSIRO, AEMO, and other groups, while the pro-nuclear cluster addressed some of these sources as well but picked different statistics or even pushed back against the information provided by these authoritative sources.
Carly also used the practice mapping approach to map these actors in the debate by the similarity of their evidentiary practices; this produces a clearer clustering and shows several distinct groups in the debate: a pro-nuclear mainstream as well as a set of pro-nuclear actors arguing from personal perspective only; anti-nuclear actors who argue against nuclear energy in a variety of often very different ways.
Some of these pro-nuclear actors have a long history of climate science denialism, and are strongly interconnected with each other; some are now engaged in anti-renewable astroturfing campaigns. There is a strong interweaving of pro-nuclear and anti-renewable claims amongst these groups.
The present study shows only one brief snapshot of these developments, in Australia; longitudinal analysis of the development of these arguments, the establishment of a comprehensive catalogue of these claims, and international comparisons of these strategies would be useful as further extensions.
