Climate Monitor: August 26th
Progressives turn up the heat for BBB with Facebook ads while deniers mock Greta Thunberg for clicks (again)
Welcome to Climate Monitor, your weekly digest of the digital tactics and strategies that polluters and climate-action groups are deploying online to shift public opinion and move legislation. We’ve examined political ad spending on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Google by over a dozen groups and corporations from the past week, as well as their activities on social media. Tell your colleagues to subscribe here!
Here’s what we found:
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Best performing Facebook post from DCC members: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Inside the online ad push for climate action in the Build Back Better Agenda
With members of Congress returning home from the August recess to push President Joe Biden’s economic agenda across the finish line, organizations and activists in the movement for climate action - including folks reading this very newsletter - are putting the pedal to the metal to pass climate legislation. With that in mind, we’re going to start providing updates in Climate Monitor outlining how much climate groups are spending online pushing for the Build Back Better Agenda, climate legislation, or both.
Without further ado, here are the top 10 spenders on Facebook ads last week among members of the Build Back Better/climate coalition and their respective messaging tracks (note that these spending totals include spending by these groups that is unrelated to BBB):
And, here’s how much these and similar groups spent on political ads on YouTube and Google last week:
For examples of some of the latest ads these groups are running, read on (or click here).
Digital advertising data 📈
The online battle over the Build Back Better Agenda is heating up, with more advertisers launching digital ad campaigns to pressure lawmakers and sway public support, specifically on the issues of climate change and clean energy.
Overall, here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related Facebook ads last week.
The League of Conservation Voters continues to be a top spender on Facebook ads, and last week they launched a new campaign targeting the moderate Gang of Nine in the House of Representatives that had been holding up the Build Back Better agenda. Their ads, which target young adults in the representatives’ respective states, call on them to seize “our once-in-a-generation opportunity to fight climate change and secure middle class tax cuts, clean energy jobs, and lower costs for working families.” We estimate that LCV has spent at least $61k on this campaign since August 20th.
At the same time, LCV is running Facebook ads thanking a handful of other moderate Democrats in Congress who are playing ball - including Reps. Slotkin, Delgado, Pappas, Malinowski, Stevens, Horsford, Kind, Spanberger, Craig, O’Halleran, Kim, McBath, Davids, Axne, Susie Lee, DeFazio, and Luria, as well as Sens. Ossoff, Warnock, Cortez Masto, Rosen, Shaheen, and Hassan - for “fighting for clean energy that can power our economy, create good-paying jobs, and tackle the climate crisis.” These video ads focus on boosting clean energy jobs that don’t need a college degree and expanding their respective states’ clean energy industries.
LCV isn’t the only one targeting moderate representatives with Facebook ads, however. The American Petroleum Institute last week also started targeting several of the same representatives mentioned above, both in the Gang of Nine and otherwise, as well as a handful of Republicans including Reps. Malliotakis, Miller-Meeks, and Chabot. Their ads use recycled rhetoric, arguing that, “Raising taxes on the U.S. natural gas and oil industry could put our economic recovery at risk!” We estimate that they’ve spent at least $31k on this campaign since August 17th.
Other groups that have been running Facebook ads pushing lawmakers over Build Back Better include the Green New Deal Network (calling on Gottheimer et al to “stop standing in the way”), the Working Families Party (telling the Mod Squad to “Stop obstructing President Biden’s proposal on jobs, climate, and care!”), and 350.org, which is railing against bipartisanship as an ineffective strategy for passing climate legislation.
Google and YouTube
Over on Google and YouTube, LCV is also running its ads promoting various members on YouTube for supporting clean energy jobs, spending $53,300 on the platform last week. This is on top of their partnership with Priorities USA, which spent $17,600 last week on their ongoing YouTube and Google Search campaign supporting Hassan and Pappas.
The new bilingual campaign from Better Jobs Together Campaign also continued, spending $24,000 on the platform last week. You can check out all of their ads here.
Snapchat
The NRDC Action Fund launched last week a month-long campaign promoting the Build Back Better Agenda on Snapchat. They’re targeting adults aged 30 and up in California, New Mexico, and Colorado, and some laud Democratic lawmakers like Reps. Levin and Porter while others simply promote BBB with a static image.
Overall, here are the top spenders on climate ads on Snapchat so far this year:
Who’s driving the online conversation on climate change?
The conversation about climate change on social media seemed to mostly revolve around four stories, each of which generated tens of thousands of interactions:
1) rain on the summit of Greenland;
2) a Utah high school teacher getting fired after ranting against climate deniers and Donald Trump, among other things, which was made viral by own-the-lib types like Glenn Beck, The Blaze, and The Daily Wire;
3) a federal judge in Alaska blocking a ConocoPhillips oil drilling project in the state; and
4) a New York Times opinion essay by Greta Thunberg and other child climate activists.
While the most-interacted single posts that mention climate change came from the likes of UNICEF and celebrities like Ian Somerhalder and Michael Moore (whose posts are only tangentially related to climate change in any case), the above four stories generated more engagement overall across posts and articles on Facebook. For example, the most-engaged post about climate change’s influence on warming weather in Greenland only received just under 10k interactions, but across all articles and outlets, the story got nearly 390k interactions, most of which came from straight news outlets like NPR, CNN, and Reuters.
The same could be said about the judiciary blocking the ConocoPhillips project in Alaska that was initially approved under the Trump administration. The story generated at least 92k interactions, driven largely by articles from The New York Times, Axios, and the Washington Post.
While engagement around these two big climate and clean energy developments was mostly driven by straight news outlets, climate deniers used more personal stories to lambast the climate movement, earning themselves similar levels of engagement in the process.
The guest opinion piece in the New York Times by Thunberg and other child climate activists generated a lot of buzz on social media. In fact, the Times’ Instagram post for the piece was one of the most-engaged posts about climate change on the platform last week, second only to posts from climber-influencer Alex Honnold.
That said, a story from The Daily Wire undermining Thunberg et al’s argument by citing a bogus “There is no climate emergency” declaration got over 51k interactions after shares from Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles,and Matt Walsh.
Over on Twitter last week, the most-engaged tweets about climate change came from high-level folks like Bernie Sanders, Pope Francis, and others advocating for climate action (or despairing about the overwhelming nature of the crisis).
Former Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell also gives us an insight into how climate deniers and other right-wing flaks might use the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to undermine the Biden administration’s bold initiatives at home.
That’s it for Climate Monitor this week. As always, head to climatemonitor.substack.com to see these updates in real time as we publish them throughout the week!
And if you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop us a line by shooting an email to ClimateMonitor@DCC.org.