How do voluntary climate-related disclosures affect third-party ESG ratings? Adopting a social constructivist perspective, we propose that corporate disclosures reveal the extent to which management considers climate risks as inside or outside its control. Building on climate change discourse literature and locus of control theory, we theorize that emphasizing physical risks reveals an external locus of control and leads outside evaluators to rate firms as having fewer environmental strengths, whereas emphasizing energy risks indicates an internal locus of control, resulting in higher environmental strength ratings. Using a novel dataset on climate risk disclosures and employing word embedding models, a recent machine-learning approach, we find support for our predictions: firms with a greater portion of physical risk receive significantly lower environmental ratings, whereas firms with a greater emphasis on energy risk receive significantly higher environmental ratings. We also explore boundary conditions regarding uncontrollable events and potential rewards for addressing climate risks, as well as the effects of disclosure uncertainty. This research enriches our understanding of climate-related disclosures by showing how they provide narrative cues as to a firm’s agentic stance, which influences ESG analysts’ meaning making and ratings.