“The house is on fire”

Abstract The climate debate tends to be polarised between hope for solutions ( ecological utopia ) and a lack of future perspectives ( eco-anxiety, ecological dystopia ). This contribution provides a linguistic, discursive, and figurative representation of the climate crisis by means of psychological and religious metaphors in French and Quebecois press discourse during the Cop26 political negotiations. Drawing on CMT and CMA, the corpus-driven analysis considers the mental lexicon shared by the francophone community through instances of subjectivation of the environmental issue linked to the climate ticking clock and its dystopian configuration. The eco-anxiety lexicon and multimodal representations appear to convey different sinister scenarios, shaping the symbolic dimensions of the crisis we live by via established but also emerging metaphors.