While past scholarship has mapped and analysed the climate discourse of high‑emitting Australian companies in highly visible public arenas such as the media (Bacon and Nash 2012; Downie and Halpin 2025; Holmes and Star 2017; Thaker 2020), far less attention has been paid to how these companies discuss climate change in less public settings. This paper addresses this gap by analysing climate discourse in the earnings calls of high‑emitting Australian companies. In an Australian first, and building on comparable studies largely focused on the United States (Baehr et al. 2025; Bain 2025; Green et al. 2022; Mahdavi et al. 2022; Sautner et al. 2023; Vestrelli et al. 2024), we examine earnings calls data from 47 publicly listed companies – including heavy hitters such as BHP, Rio Tinto and Santos – between 2014 and 2026. These companies are among Australia’s top 200 emitters, which accounted for 94% of national emissions in the 2013-14 financial year, 27% of which were generated by the 47 companies. Using text analysis methods, we code climate mentions by both content (climate science, policy, and business decisions) and sentiment. This allows us to trace changes in climate discourse over time, across industries, and between companies that are reducing emissions and those that are not. We use these data to assess whether shifts in the balance of organised interests are evident as the clean energy transition progresses. The paper also compares climate discourse in earnings calls with that in media coverage for select cases, enabling an assessment of how corporate climate messaging varies across arenas with different levels of public visibility. By examining how high‑emitting companies communicate about climate change in both public and semi‑private forums, this study sheds light on corporate messaging strategies – including greenwashing – used to manage scrutiny and delay climate action, with important implications for public perceptions of these companies in Australia.
