Climate Monitor: July 22nd
New Facebook ads from Amazon-backed Climate Pledge and new AJP ads from smaller climate groups
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: The Years Project
Top ad spenders: The Climate Pledge, Exxon, Volvo, Geothermal, Potential Energy Coalition, and LCV
Spending on climate, environment, and energy ads on Facebook grew across the board over the past week, with climate groups increasing their spending the most thanks in large part to The Climate Pledge, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Potential Science Coalition.
LCV also spent a whopping $54,100 on YouTube ads pushing federal Democratic lawmakers to include bold climate action in the American Jobs Plan, including this new ad:
Below are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related Facebook ads last week.
Climate activists use global historic flooding to push for climate action on social media
Climate activists - such as Greta Thunberg, Bernie Sanders, and Lisa Neubauer - are using Facebook and Instagram to spread images of the historic catastrophic flooding in the lowlands of western Europe and emphasize how urgent the need is for climate action. Media outlets around the world covered the floods’ devastation in Europe, but we found that these outlets - such as the New York Times - often got significantly more engagement on their posts when they didn’t connect the floods to climate change.
Triplecheck: Over the past week, more than 4 million people were exposed to climate misinformation.
Analysts at Triplecheck found that more than 4 million people were exposed to climate misinformation along a variety of tracks:
It’s worth noting that the attacks with the widest reach wrapped support for efforts to combat climate change into a larger negative narrative focused on cultural issues. For example, a tweet attacking the Texas Democrats leaving the state to block a vote on legislation that would undermine the right to vote called them hypocrites for taking a private jet while supporting efforts to combat climate change. This is ridiculous, not just because the ad-hominem attack on private planes is fundamentally flawed (see last week’s newsletter) but also factually inaccurate, because those members -- many of whom are not exactly stalwart environmentalists -- are not unified on the issue of climate change. It was seen by more than 2 million people over the past week.
Bezos' space flight received more engagement in one day than climate change did in the past week
On July 20, the day Jeff Bezos left and returned to Earth, public Facebook posts about him got nearly 3 million interactions, while from July 13 - 20, posts about climate only got around 2.7 million interactions.
Posts about Jeff Bezos also got a fair amount of engagement on Instagram, but only about two-thirds as much as posts about climate change did.
Climate groups spending more on Facebook ads in the Midwest than polluters
Climate groups last week outspent polluters on Facebook ads targeting six key Midwestern states: Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. To break down their spending, here’s how much the biggest investors among climate groups and polluters spent targeting the above six states with Facebook ads last week:
That’s it for Climate Monitor this week. As always, log in to climatemonitor.substack.com to see these updates in real time as we publish them throughout the week!
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