Alternatives To The X API For A Student Project?

Hi community,

I’m a student working on my undergraduate thesis, which involves mapping the narrative discourses on the environmental crisis on X. To do this, I need to scrape public tweets containing keywords like “climate change” and “deforestation” for subsequent content analysis.

My biggest challenge is the new API limitations, which have made access very expensive and restrictive for academic projects without funding.

So, I’m asking for your help: does anyone know of a viable way to collect this data nowadays? I’m looking for:

1. Python code or libraries that can still effectively extract public tweets.
2. Web scraping tools or third-party platforms (preferably free) that can work around the API limitations.
3. Any strategy or workaround that would allow access to this data for research purposes.

Any tip, tutorial link, or tool name would be a huge help. Thank you so much!

TL;DR: Student with zero budget needs to scrape X for a thesis. Since the API is off-limits, what are the current best methods or tools to get public tweet data?