Climate Monitor: September 23rd
LCV, Climate Power grow their digital ad investments for the Build Back Better Agenda as more groups join the online push
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:
Best performing Facebook post from DCC members: Yale Program on Climate Communication
Inside the online ad push for climate action in the Build Back Better Agenda
It appears that Climate Power has stopped running boosted news Facebook ads as of September 15th, and are now investing in three other campaigns featuring videos and graphics. . One, which they have been pursuing on YouTube for the past couple of weeks, attacks a group of freshman Republicans with ads in either English or Spanish for ignoring climate change. Their other two campaigns highlight the overwhelming popularity of bold climate action with voters and promote the economic benefits of electrifying America’s cars and trucks.
Overall, here’s a breakdown of how much pro-BBB advertisers spent on Facebook last week:
And, here’s how much these and similar groups spent on political ads on YouTube and Google last week. House Majority Forward and American Bridge didn’t run any ads on the platform last week, indicating to us that they have either paused or altogether stopped their campaigns there. Other climate groups, namely the League of Conservation Voters and Climate Power, are continuing to spend heavily on their own campaigns.
More Digital advertising data 📈
Facebook + Instagram
Before we dig into it, here are the top 25 spenders on climate and energy-related ads on Facebook from last week:
Growth in Facebook political ad spending by climate groups over the past week was primarily driven by LCV, which nearly doubled their spending on the platform from the previous week. Most recently, their ads have been continuing to promote Biden’s economic pitch on clean energy (“When I think climate change, I think jobs.”) in email acquisition ads targeting various states, and they’re also running ads supporting a handful of Democratic lawmakers in Congress. They’re currently using their ads to support Reps. Debbie Dingell, Don McEachin, and Cindy Axne, and they’re also running a Spanish-language ad targeting mostly younger men and older women in Arizona supporting Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema.
New to spending on Facebook political ads is the American Wind Energy Association, which dropped $41,697 on the platform last week. They started running video ads on September 15th targeting Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Nevada, New Hampshire, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, DC calling for Congress to invest in clean energy infrastructure in the upcoming public works bills. Their ads focus on the economic benefits of investing in clean energy.
On the other side, it looks like both Exxon and BP America are slowly increasing their spending on the platform after a brief earlier in the month. Exxon doesn’t seem to be running any particularly new ads - they’re continuing to push “unnecessary regulations slow our economy down” and “American businesses can’t afford a tax increase.” Meanwhile, BP is running new video ads about methane regulation, in which characters explain that methane has a “higher warming potential” than fossil fuels, “but the thing is, natural gas is cleaner than fossil fuels, and can power things that can’t run on batteries yet, like trucking and heavy industry, so cleaning up its production so we can have gas in the energy mix - it’s a big deal.” These ads mostly target older women nationwide.
After months of collecting weekly Facebook data, we’re proud to introduce to our Climate Monitor readers a new way of looking at spending on the platform by climate groups and polluters. We’ve been tracking spending by dozens of groups, and with enough data under our belts we can now present a week-over-week visualization, which presents a pretty clear view of how climate groups have been escalating their Facebook political ad platform since early August:
Google and YouTube
When it comes to YouTube ads, LCV and Climate Power are continuing to drop huge sums on the platform every week - they spent $188,800 and $75,900 on the platform last week, respectively. Neither are running many new ads, though, except for this one from Climate Power, which appears to target Washington, DC, northern Virginia, western Maryland, and a county in south central Pennsylvania.
Third Way is also running new YouTube ads supporting Reps. Marc Veasey and Sharice Davids, focusing on the benefits that “tax cuts” may have for fighting climate change. They spent $6,200 on these ads last week.
Lastly, we’d like to note that climate groups have really been the only ones advertising on Google and YouTube (that we know of), but the Nevada Petroleum Marketers and Convenience Store Association has broken that seal with a series of YouTube ads claiming that Biden is breaking his no-new-tax-on-working-families promise by “raising taxes on consumer goods.” They spent $800 last week targeting these ads at Nevadans in the state’s 1st, 2nd, and 3rd congressional districts, all currently represented by Democrats.
Snapchat
There weren’t any new Snapchat ads by climate groups in the past week, but we did find a new development in the fight over the hydroelectric power project in Northern Maine. Vote No to Protect Maine has spent $503 so far on six-second ads urging Mainers to, well, vote No on Question 1 in November, an initiative that would effectively halt New England Clean Energy Connect’s project.
Overall, here are the top spenders on climate ads on Snapchat so far this year:
Who’s driving the online conversation on climate change?
Far and away the top post about climate change on both Facebook and Instagram last week were Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s posts about her provocative TAX THE RICH Met Gala dress. She used the moment to call for increasing taxes on the super wealthy to finance public investments in “childcare, healthcare, and climate action for all,” earning over 157k interactions on Facebook and over 2.39 *million* on Instagram. A follow-up Instagram video from her about the theory behind the statement dress earned an additional 281.2k interactions.
Otherwise, one of the biggest voices for climate action on Facebook is none other than President Joe Biden, as four of the top 10 Facebook posts and three of the top 10 Instagram posts mentioning climate change and related keywords came from his pages, getting around 140k and 343k interactions in total on each platform Each post highlights either the grim consequences of inaction, the opportunities that climate action presents, or both:
Unfortunately, the right-wing online media machine is also maintaining its own bad-faith drumbeat. Late last week, Fox News livestreamed remarks on climate change from Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a virtual international conference between multiple heads of state and special envoys. The stream ended up being one of the most-engaged posts about climate change on Facebook last week, driven largely by hate clicks. Roughly 84 percent of likes on the post were Angry or Haha reactions, and many of the most-engaged comments on the post expressed severe skepticism and disdain of Biden’s focus on climate change.
Helping to fuel this skepticism among the right-wing propaganda audience last week was Rep. Dan Crenshaw, with an assist from his friends at The Daily Wire. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted - again - about how concurrent environmental disasters underline the need for urgent climate action, which ended up being one of the most-engaged tweets about climate change last week with over 82.5k likes and retweets.
However, Crenshaw responded with a bad-faith argument about Sanders’ position on nuclear energy and carbon capture, and The Daily Wire successfully spun up the exchange as a clickbait piece that got 29.3k interactions across Facebook and Twitter, making it the third-most engaged article about climate change last week.
And lastly, here are the top five tweets mentioning climate change and related terms from last week, which notably include tweets from Biden and Ocasio-Cortez quote-tweeting Biden:
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.