BP tells EPA to “Flex your muscles!” in new ads
Plus, a look at new pro-climate digital ads targeting key ‘22 states
Welcome to Climate Monitor, a weekly digest of the digital tactics and strategies that polluters and climate-action groups are using to shift public opinion and move legislation. We’ve examined political ad spending on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Google by several dozen groups and corporations from the past week, as well as what’s trending on social media. Tell your colleagues to subscribe here!
TL;DR:
Science Moms made another six-figure investment in Meta political ads last week, while Third Way launched ads supporting vulnerable House Dems that tout their clean energy work.
Sierra Club is running email acquisition ads in Georgia trying to raise awareness of upcoming Public Service Commission elections in the state.
BP spent over $70k on Meta political ads last week calling on the EPA to “Flex your muscles” and reduce methane emissions, weeks after the Supreme Court gutted the agency’s ability to do just that.
The National Association of Manufacturers and ExxonMobil are both running ads against what remains of the Build Back Better Agenda, arguing that tax increases would either “do nothing to reduce energy costs” or “put up to 1 million jobs at risk.”
While right-wing online pages like Fox News and Donald Trump Jr. are still harping on their manufactured Strategic Petroleum Reserves/China/Hunter Biden controversy, Team Biden is having relative social media success claiming decreasing gas prices.
National Digital Ad Spending on Climate
Meta (Facebook + Instagram)
First, here are the top 25 spenders nationwide on climate and energy-related ads on Meta platforms from last week:
Last week, Science Moms again made a six-figure Meta political ad buy, bringing their total spend on the platform for July up to nearly $280k. They’re continuing to invest in ads targeting key midterm states including AZ, GA, NC, PA, and WI that either give women a call to action or use simple messaging like “This extreme heat is not normal” to inform about climate change.
They’re not the only pro-climate group that targeted states with key races this past week. Centrist group Third Way spent just over $6k last week on new ads promoting House Democrats in 12 competitive races that appropriate right-wing rhetoric about “affordable energy” to push a positive economic message about clean energy
Additionally, Sierra Club might be getting into Georgia’s Public Service Commission election this year. They’re running email acquisition ads targeting young adults in the Peach State with messages like, “Want to put a solar panel on your house to reduce energy costs? Sign up to learn why our state regulators are preventing you from getting the best deal.” We estimate that they’ve spent about $4.5k on this campaign since it launched earlier this month.
Meanwhile, spending on Met a political ads by polluters grew by over 50 percent last week, largely because BP is back on the board with a classic case of greenwashing ads. They spent over $70k on the platform last week pushing ads calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to “flex your muscles” to cut methane emissions, which is awfully rich coming from the company that gave nearly $300k across 2018 and 2022 to the Republican senators (and Joe Manchin) who helped shape the Supreme Court which just weeks ago gutted the EPA’s ability to do just what BP is calling for in their ads.
So, a fossil fuel company is running ads pushing for policies that they’re actively opposing behind the scenes. What else is new? Well, the National Association of Manufacturers has joined ExxonMobil in running vague ads opposing “raising taxes on American manufacturers,” alluding to the remnants of the Build Back Better Agenda, which is also in shambles thanks to Manchin’s and the GOP’s intransigence.
Google + YouTube
We found two new Google political ad campaigns discussing energy or climate from the past week. The largest of these came from Maine Affordable Energy, a utility-aligned group that has been running Meta ads for years opposing efforts to replace the state’s two investor-owned utility companies with a consumer-owned utility. Now, they’ve gone up on YouTube with an ad arguing that such a move is “too risky and expensive for Maine.”
Moving down the East Coast, the NRDC Action Fund spent $1,300 last week on a YouTube ad criticizing Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin for wanting to pull the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Check out their ad:
Overall, here’s how much these groups spent on Google political ads last week:
Snapchat
There were no new or ongoing political ad campaigns concerning climate change or energy on Snapchat last week. Overall, here’s how much groups have invested in the platform so far this year:
Climate & Energy Ads in the 2022 Elections
We identified several digital ad campaigns about energy from battleground midterm campaigns across the country.
GA-SEN: Pro-Herschel Walker group 34N22 is blaming high prices solely on Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock: “Electricity and natural gas prices have risen 41.6% in the past year (in Biden/Warnock’s America). Georgia: if you’re sick of what Biden and Warnock have done to our families, COMMIT to voting Warnock out! #WarnockIsntWorking.” Meanwhile, Herschel Walker himself is also pushing similar rhetoric in his latest ads.
MN-02: Republican Tyler Kistner is following the broader GOP playbook on energy, among other things: “Under Democrat leadership, we have record breaking inflation, surging gas prices, reckless spending, uncontrollable illegal immigration and a war on domestic energy production.”
NH-SEN: Republican Chuck Morse is joining the leagues of GOPers standing at gas pumps and acting upset while echoing Big Oil talking points: “The historic gas hike directly results from Joe Biden’s and Maggie Hassan’s constant attacks on American energy producers on top of their reckless billion-dollar spending spree of taxpayer dollars.”
NJ-07: Republican Tom Kean is running ads that are nearly identical to ads from the American Petroleum Institute: “Tell Tom Malinowski: SUPPORT AMERICAN ENERGY PRODUCTION! 🇺🇸⛽”
Reaching Frontline Communities
A new grassroots organizing group in Minnesota called We Choose Us has spent $4,640 on Meta political ads so far this month as a part of their broader campaign to build a proper multiracial democracy in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Their ads place environmental concerns as a cornerstone of their movement:
“When we saw all the pollution that was on this beautiful lakeshore…when I saw that factory farms were threatening our water, our environment…I knew it was time to take action, and we knew we couldn’t do it alone.”
Tracking Climate Disinfo Online
Triplecheck found that more than 10 million people were exposed to climate misinformation on Twitter during the time period reviewed, an increase of 10 percent from last week's exposure levels. The content had over 74,000 engagements on Facebook, an increase of more than 100 percent from last week's exposure levels. The content had over 4,100,000 views on Telegram, an increase of 15 percent from last week's exposure levels.
The top narratives and themes are below. You can find Triplecheck’s full report here.
Climate change is a hoax
6,300,000 human accounts exposed on Twitter
Economic crisis in Sri Lanka is a result of climate legislation
5,000,000 human accounts exposed on Twitter
Over 300 engagements on Facebook
Over 240,000 views on Telegram.
Manchin will not support action on climate change
470,000 human accounts exposed on Twitter
Over 59,000 engagements on Facebook
What’s trending organically?
Last week, the most engaged Facebook posts mentioning climate change, energy, and related terms far and away came from Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who continues to drive significant engagement on the platform by pushing climate-skeptical, fossil-fuel-loving disinformation. Last week, he argued that all the oil America needs for centuries is right under Texas and New Mexico, saying “Facts!” with literally no evidence. Nonetheless, his post got nearly 200k interactions, 130k of which were shares. Another point of disinformation came from Donald Trump Jr., who amplified a Benny Johnson/Laura Ingraham clip pushing the conspiracy that the Biden administration sent some of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) “to Communist Chinese firm where Hunter OWNED stake.” His post got 87k interactions and 691k video views.
That said, President Joe Biden and the White House are driving significant Facebook engagement in pushing the argument that gas prices are going down because of the administration’s policies. Four posts from Team Biden about declining gas prices got 237k interactions, and the top post, from Biden’s campaign page, argued that “Oil and gas companies must not use this moment as an excuse for profiting by not passing along savings at the pump.”
On the EV front, the most trending story came out of Texas, where Tesla has asked drivers in the state to charge their vehicles outside of peak hours to help the grid stay online. Jalopnik, a transportation-focused digital magazine, and Ben Shapiro posted about the news, with the latter claiming, “that certainly throws a wrench in the whole "EV to the rescue" narrative…”
Overall, here’s how the most engaged content on Facebook breaks down:
On Instagram, two posts utterly dominated all other posts mentioning climate change last week, with each getting over 1.5 million engagements. The first came from actor Ian Somerhalder, who used a thirst trap to discuss coping with climate change, and the second came from NASA, which posted a remarkable image of a SpaceX launch carrying equipment that should help us better understand how mineral dust cools or warms our planet.
Other than those two outliers, engagement on Instagram posts mentioning climate or energy was more typical. Leonardo DiCaprio drove nearly 200k engagements in total on posts about wildfires in Yosemite and conservation efforts in the Galápagos Islands, while Joe Biden got 57k interactions on another post discussing falling gas prices. At the same time, Fox News got 49k interactions on a post pushing the SPR-China-Hunter Biden conspiracy theory.
Overall, here’s how the most engaged content on Instagram mentioning climate, energy, and related terms breaks down:
That’s it for Climate Monitor this week. As always, if you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop us a line by shooting an email to nick@fwiwmedia.com.