Climate Monitor: August 5th
Biden administration moves away from “American Jobs Plan” while fossil fuel companies find a new way to greenwash
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.
Here’s what we found:
Best performing Facebook post from DCC members: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Top ad spenders: The Climate Pledge, Exxon, Volvo, Geothermal, Potential Energy Coalition, and LCV
Spending on climate, environment, and energy ads on Facebook and Google remained mostly steady last week with climate groups - especially the Environmental Defense Fund and the League of Conservation Voters - have continued running clean energy and climate action-oriented infrastructure ads.
Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute has started running a Facebook ad campaign targeting western Democratic senators representing Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana that pushes them to oppose a ban on fossil fuel extraction on federal lands.
Overall, here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related Facebook ads last week.
Social media roundup: Looking at the most-engaged climate + infrastructure posts
President Joe Biden has been driving the conversation around infrastructure on Facebook last week. Of the top 10 posts that mention infrastructure, seven came from the president. However, Breitbart has had a pretty outsized influence on Instagram, where they made seven of the top 10 posts about infrastructure on the platform last week.
Breitbart seems to be focusing on channeling and whipping up rage amongst extremely online Republican voters, accusing the 17 GOP senators who voted to advanced the bipartisan infrastructure bill of a “HISTORIC REPUBLICAN PARTY BETRAYAL” - and they were rewarded handsomely with very high engagement.
White House shifts from “American Jobs Plan” to “Build Back Better” in online infrastructure push
In pushing for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package, we found that Biden’s pages have significantly increased their usage of “Build Back Better” in recent weeks while practically eliminating their usage of “American Jobs Plan.” We also noticed that their usage of rhetoric around climate change has also increased.
The administration’s shift from selling the infrastructure package as the American Jobs Plan to the Build Back Better Agenda has been rather quick, but the biggest climate groups - including the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, the Sunrise Movement, and others - have mostly followed suit. We looked at posts from the nine biggest climate groups and found that they’ve dramatically reduced their usage of “American Jobs Plan” in their Facebook feeds, but they have yet to use “Build Back Better” at quite the same clip.
However, regardless of whichever term these groups use to define the administration’s infrastructure proposal, we found that their posts that use either do not perform well on Facebook. Over the past three months, the top post from these groups mentioning either term came from the Sierra Club, and it only got 932 reactions. It would appear that these groups have gotten modestly better engagement on posts that talk about infrastructure without putting them in the White House’s terms.
Fossil fuel companies using ESG reporting to greenwash their brands in Facebook ads
We’ve identified at least three fossil companies that have been using Facebook ads to make their brands seem amenable to ESG disclosures: Williams Companies, Exelon, and ConocoPhillips, which together have spent $92,072 in the past 90 days on greenwashing Facebook ads.
Of these three companies, Williams Companies is by far the biggest investor in Facebook ads, having spent $74,688 there in the past 90 days. In late July, they ran a campaign mostly targeting young adults in Texas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Some ads claimed that “Williams is leading the industry with commitments to ESG and investments in technology to accelerate our journey to net zero,” while others in the same campaign touted natural gas: “Williams is leading the industry with commitments to ESG and investments in technology to accelerate our journey to net zero.”
We have also found one group that has used Facebook ads to explicitly argue against ESG disclosures: the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that is in part funded by Charles Koch. They spent at least $300 on an Facebook ad targeting young adults in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Louisiana, that claims that “Energy Investing Will Hurt in the Long Run.” They also run anti-clean energy ads through a page called “Life: Powered,” which is a bit more extreme in its rhetoric. Last month, they ran an ad that called ESG investing “Criminal Collusion on Wall Street,” linking to a reposted story from The Epoch Times.