Biden executive order, record-breaking tornadoes drove online climate conversation
Looking at last week's top climate posts: December 5th - 11th
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Occupy Democrats (76.4k interactions), Occupy Democrats (36.3k interactions), and UNICEF (26.7k interactions).
It’s not at all surprising that last week’s extraordinary tornado storm led to some highly engaged posts on social media; it’s a highly emotional story about a devastating weather event that was almost certainly facilitated by climate change, specifically a warmer than usual Gulf of Mexico. Additionally, Occupy Democrats is exceptional at driving highly engaged Facebook posts, especially when they’re at all related to Mitch McConnell.
However, right-wing media have a tried and true playbook for when climate change comes knocking, similar to the one the gun lobby has been using for years: make Democrats look like they’re exploiting a tragedy for political gain. The fourth-most engaged article mentioning climate change or related terms last week came from Fox News, which got 16.3k interactions on a story headlined, “Biden uses tornado tragedy to push climate agenda, suggests storms are ‘consequence of the warming’.” Breitbart and Red State Observer also rolled out articles with similar angles.
Overall, the top three Instagram posts about climate change and related terms came from The New York Times, Bloomberg Business, and HIGHSNOBIETY. The premier of the star-studded climate satire, “Don’t Look Up,” resulted in some relatively highly engaged content around climate change, but ironically HIGHSNOBIETY’s post about the premier wasn’t about the movie or climate change - it was about Jonah Hill’s appearance.
Additionally, Jeff Bezos’ continued private trips into lower orbit continue to drive traffic on social media, as does the billionaire’s charity PR plays. Bloomberg’s Instagram post above, which got 35.8k interactions, highlighted how Bezos donated a fifth of a percent of his net worth to climate groups, while at the same time, last week’s top tweet about climate change and carbon highlighted how much his “space” trips emit.
We’ll also note that President Biden’s executive order “directing the federal government to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050” also drove a fair amount of engagement across social media. Not only was his announcing tweet the third-best performing tweet mentioning climate change and emissions last week, but stories about the order generated a spike in activity around related articles. We estimate that stories about the order generated at least 110k interactions across Facebook and Twitter.
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week.