Climate Monitor: July 8th
Big digital ad spending from NRDC; Sec. Granholm target of right-wing attacks
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 digital ad spenders: Volvo, NRDC, API, EDF, and Earthjustice
Shell has ended their Facebook campaign advertising its alleged commitment to reach a net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, significantly reducing polluters’ collective investment in advertising on the platform from previous weeks. Meanwhile, more environmental groups are joining the online push for climate action and resiliency in the American Jobs Plan, including the Environmental Defense Fund, which spent more than $20k on Facebook ads about the infrastructure package.
Below are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related Facebook ads last week.
Top organic posts roundup: Secretary Granholm targeted for comments on Surfside
Following a CNN spot where Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that they “don’t know fully” if climate change played a role in the condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., right-wing pages like Dan Bongino, The Daily Caller, and Glenn Beck pounced. We found that because of the non-controversy they generated, public Facebook posts about the Secretary got over 175k interactions, a spike in engagement second only to the last time right-wing pages went after her in May during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown when posts about her got a cumulative 554k interactions.
Here are the top 10 posts from climate and polluter groups on Facebook last week and the # of interactions each post received:
Here are the top 10 posts from climate and polluter groups on Instagram last week and the # of interactions each post received:
Relatedly, we also zoomed out and took a broader look at the top anti-climate Facebook posts from right-wing media pundits over the past 30 days. You can scroll through those posts here.
Greenpeace UK’s Exxon leak limited in reach online, but Exxon now on defense
Overall, the impact of this story on Facebook was relatively low: there were 858 public posts about Exxon from June 29 - July 7th that earned 191k interactions in total. The story’s reach appeared to be even lower on Instagram initially, but climate activists and other progressive pages used footage of the Gulf of Mexico oil pipeline fire to draw more attention to Exxon. As a result, engagement on posts about Exxon peaked, driving 114.5k interactions in one day, suggesting to us that dramatic imagery of new climate disasters like last week’s Gulf fire may drive engagement on the Exxon story and others like it on Instagram.
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! If you have any comments, questions, or additional topics you’d like us to track, feel free to drop us a line by shooting an email to ClimateMonitor@DCC.org.