The concept of “carbon neutrality” is emerging as the central element of the international regime on climate change. How this concept is received by states and their publics will play an important role in the political conflicts surrounding the regime. We map and explain the patterns of carbon neutrality emergence in public debates in Europe and around the world. Using Natural Language Processing, we study close to 3.4 million carefully sampled online news articles in 2018-2021 from 138 countries, jointly accounting for 94 percent of the world’s population. The empirical evidence highlights the importance of the discursive characteristics of the national climate change debates for the reception of the novel concept, but also a strongly non-linear effect of states’ affluence and climate vulnerability. Importantly, our results demonstrate the need to cover both the Global North and the Global South in analyses of the climate regime operation. We specifically compare the patterns of carbon neutrality media coverage observed in Europe with those in other parts of the world, providing descriptive evidence for the period 2018 – spring 2024, including the run-up to European Parliament elections.