Signal
01
Specimen signal · 3 August 2026
How institutional language on energy moved, 2019–2026
This signal reads the actual words. It draws on the speeches of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and United Kingdom government ministers — every one a full transcript from the institution that published it. Nothing here comes from press coverage or commentary. The question it answers is not what these institutions decided. It is what they said, how that changed, and who changed first.
Not journalism. Not opinion. Speech Intelligence.
Four findings
01
The energy shock of 2022 is visible in central bank language before it is visible anywhere else. ECB speeches mentioning fossil fuels went from 7.2% to 26.8% in a single year.
02
Britain has stopped saying “net zero”. The phrase peaked in 15.1% of ministerial speeches in 2021. It now appears in 2.9%.
03
The Commission absorbed the shock and kept talking. Where the ECB spiked and retreated, the Commission rose and held — and is the only one of the three still discussing transition at scale.
04
Everyone names the problem. Almost nobody names the cause. Across eighty years of UN General Debate speeches, 79.5% mention climate change and 8.6% mention fossil fuels.
Bases: 6,676 Commission speeches · 589 ECB speeches · 6,034 UK ministerial speeches
Drawn from the Talks Decoded archive of 255,000 speeches, 1946–2026, maintained daily
Figures correct as at 6 August 2026. The archive grows daily; every signal is a snapshot of the record on its date.
One
The shock nobody expected a central bank to register
In 2022 the European Central Bank spent more than a quarter of its public speeches discussing fossil fuels. The year before, the figure was 7.2%. The year after, it fell by more than half. Energy security — a phrase entirely absent from ECB speeches in 2019, 2020 and 2021 — appeared in 14.6% of them. This matters because the ECB’s mandate is price stability. Energy policy is not its brief.
Share of speeches containing the phrase
2019
2021
2022
2023
2025
ECB — fossil fuels
1.9%
7.2%
26.8%
11.8%
2.4%
ECB — energy security
0.0%
0.0%
14.6%
11.8%
1.2%
Commission — fossil fuels
1.0%
7.0%
16.4%
12.8%
5.5%
Commission — energy security
1.1%
1.3%
7.0%
5.5%
5.4%
UK ministers — fossil fuels
1.4%
3.9%
3.5%
1.0%
1.6%
UK ministers — energy security
0.3%
0.6%
3.9%
2.9%
2.8%
Read down the 2022 column. All three register the shock, at wildly different amplitudes. The institution furthest from energy policy talked about it most.
Two
The phrase Britain stopped using
“Net zero” entered British ministerial speech quickly and left it just as quickly. In 2021, the year Britain hosted COP26, 15.1% of ministerial speeches used the phrase. By 2025, 2.9% — a decline of 81% from peak.
Share of speeches containing “net zero”
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
UK ministers
9.4%
15.1%
8.4%
6.7%
3.4%
2.9%
European Commission
1.2%
3.4%
2.8%
10.4%
8.2%
2.8%
ECB
1.2%
13.3%
9.8%
15.8%
11.7%
3.7%
Britain’s peak came in 2021 and has fallen every year since. The Commission’s came two years later, suggesting the phrase migrated rather than faded: it left British political speech at roughly the point it entered European institutional speech.
Three
The problem named, the cause unnamed
The widest view available is the UN General Debate, where every member state speaks annually. Four in five leaders name the condition. Fewer than one in twelve name what causes it.
Share of UN General Debate speeches, by decade
Climate
Warming
Renewable
Fossil
1980s
1.1%
1.2%
6.6%
0.3%
1990s
10.1%
3.8%
1.7%
0.5%
2000s
33.3%
8.3%
6.5%
2.3%
2010s
69.0%
10.8%
14.6%
3.0%
2020s
79.5%
12.5%
22.5%
8.6%
There is also a reversal worth noting. “Renewable” was mentioned more often in the 1980s than in the 1990s. It entered world rhetoric during the oil shocks as a matter of energy security, disappeared when oil grew cheap, and returned decades later dressed as climate policy. The same word, two entirely different arguments.
Four
What to read
The archive holds 24,892 Commission speeches. The purpose of measurement is to say which of them matter. Below are the most heavily hedged Commission speeches mentioning fossil fuels since January 2025 — the places where official language is least settled, and therefore where positions are still being formed.
Date
Speaker
Occasion
Words
Hedging
10 Jun 2026
Tzitzikostas
Video message to the Fuels Europe annual conference
823
2.31
18 Feb 2025
Tzitzikostas
Transport & Environment, from the Green Deal to the Clean Industrial Deal
959
1.29
15 Feb 2025
Roswall
From Mines to Markets, Munich Security Conference
1,366
1.26
12 Jun 2026
Ribera
Foresight and Innovation International Award Ceremony
3,301
1.18
17 Jun 2026
Ribera
European Economic and Social Committee, 606th plenary session
1,833
1.15
9 Apr 2026
Dombrovskis
Dialogue on fiscal rules, European Parliament ECON Committee
976
1.14
Six speeches out of 24,892. The most hedged of them is a video message to a fossil fuel industry conference, at more than twice the level of the next — the first thing a serious analyst would read.
Method, stated plainly
Sources are the publishing institutions themselves: the European Commission press corner, the ECB, and gov.uk. Every speech is a full transcript, not a summary or a press report. Phrase frequencies are the share of speeches containing a phrase at least once. Hedging uses the Loughran-McDonald uncertainty lexicon, standard in financial text analysis; readability uses Flesch Reading Ease.
Limits. Phrase counting registers presence, not emphasis: a passing mention counts the same as a sustained argument. The uncertainty lexicon was built for corporate filings rather than speech, and should be read as indicative. Some annual bases are small — the ECB publishes roughly eighty speeches a year, so single-year movements there carry wider error than the Commission’s thousand. None of these limits affects the direction of the findings, each of which rests on movements far larger than the measurement error.