Climate Monitor: July 29th
Right-wing pages balk at aggressive climate action while LCV and Priorities USA team up for huge digital ad campaign
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 and Google remained mostly steady last week with climate groups mostly continuing ad campaigns pushing for climate action in the American Jobs Plan.
However, Facebook ad spending by polluters grew by almost a third thanks almost entirely to ExxonMobil and the American Chemistry Council. The latter launched a new campaign against a “Superfund Tax” on “essential materials” without once mentioning plastic.
Meanwhile, the League of Conservation Voters continued their huge multi-platform campaign. They spent $68,300 on YouTube ads last week, and also started targeting young adults in New Hampshire and Nevada with Facebook ads like the ones below. Notably, while LCV is still focused on infrastructure, it appears they may be moving away from promoting the “American Jobs Plan” toward using President Joe Biden’s initial campaign push of “Build Back Better”:
Overall, here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related Facebook ads last week.
Social media roundup: Right-wing pages work to undermine Civilian Climate Corps by making AOC its face
A Rumble article about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s continued push for aggressive climate action - including the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps - got 17.8k interactions on Facebook after Dan Bongino shared it, and the story got another 5.5k interactions after Sean Hannity and Donald Trump For President shared similar articles. We suspect that Dan Bongino et al may have been trying to reduce the chances of the Civilian Climate Corps becoming reality (or at least starving it of public support if it is passed) by associating it with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
We also noticed that the White House Facebook page seems to face regular pushback from keyboard-happy Americans on the issue of climate action, especially when the page argues for intersectional action. One high-performing post got 15,508 Haha reactions and only 6,205 Likes, indicating to us that most folks who’ve engaged with this post didn’t take the statement seriously. A quick look at the post’s top comments confirmed our suspicions:
Triplecheck: Zuckerberg’s embarrassing self own
Analysts at Triplecheck found that more than 8 million people were exposed to climate misinformation over the past week.
This week, Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview to The Vergecast, where he talked about the difficulties Facebook faces in clamping down on misinformation circulating on the platform and compared the work they’re doing to “...fighting crime in a city. No one expects that you’re going to fully solve crime in a city.”
As Inc’s Jason Aten points out, though, “...it’s safe to say that Zuckerberg’s analogy breaks down when you consider that generally speaking the police aren’t providing safe haven for the criminals, giving them a free tool to communicate with each other, and amplifying their efforts, helping them recruit more criminals.
The climate ads Virginia voters are seeing ahead of November 2021
Only three climate groups are currently targeting Virginia with a focus on the upcoming statewide and local elections: Virginia League of Conservation Voters, Chesapeake Climate Action Network Action Fund, and Advanced Energy Works, the latter being a project of Advanced Energy Economy. While each group is supporting different sets of state delegates, all of them are using the recently passed VCEA and stronger vehicle emission standards to promote their chosen incumbents. The three groups have so far spent $23,506 targeting VA in the past 90 days, and they mostly target Virginians (presumably in the specific state House districts) aged 25 - 54.
The three groups are almost certainly coordinating on their Facebook ads, judging by the fact that the Virginia LCV and CCAN Action Fund are running ads with identical copy and near-identical creative.
LCV and Priorities USA launch New Hampshire digital ad campaign backing Sen. Maggie Hassan and Rep. Chris Pappas
The League of Conservation Voters and Priorities USA launched on Wednesday a $250,000 multiplatform digital ad campaign supporting Sen. Maggie Hassan and Rep. Chris Pappas, both of whom are up for re-election next year. The ads, which will all target New Hampshire, tout the lawmakers’ work “tackling climate change and fighting to create thousands of clean energy jobs” alongside President Joe Biden.
LCV is already one of the biggest spenders on Facebook ads targeting New Hampshire, having spent $45,213 there in the past three months, behind only End Citizens United and Americans for Prosperity. Since this campaign is so new, it’s hard to say how much they’re spending right out of the gate, but we do know that they’ve already launched a huge variety of Facebook ads for the campaign. Most of them exclusively target New Hampshirites aged 18 - 54, with a particular focus on reaching women aged 25 - 44.
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!
And if you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop us a line by shooting an email to ClimateMonitor@DCC.org.