Climate Monitor: September 9th
Climate + BBB advocates start to shift gears in digital ads as natural disasters keep fueling calls for urgency
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: The Years Project
Inside the online ad push for climate action in the Build Back Better Agenda
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen climate groups and other advocates for the Build Back Better Agenda quickly grow their digital ad spending, but that growth seems to have slowed significantly last week, with some groups having reached or passed an apparent peak in spending or reducing their investments, including the NRDC Action Fund, EnergyBoom, and Science Moms.
On the other hand, a couple groups are continuing to spend more on Facebook ads, such as Climate Power (more on that below) and Building Back Together. The latter of these is now running a six-figure bilingual campaign supporting various Democratic members of the House of Representatives - including some of the conservative members who threatened to derail it not long ago - and touting the economic benefits of the Build Back Better agenda. However, despite the size of their campaign they are not yet running any ads about clean energy or climate change.
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. The League of Conservation Voters and Advancing AZ both significantly increased their spending on the platform from the previous week. The Hub Project’s campaign is now running YouTube ads touting Sen. Mark Kelly’s support of the Child Tax Credit that seem to geotarget Phoenix suburbs, the Sedona area, and portions of Native reservations in eastern Arizona.
For examples of some of the latest ads these groups are running, read on (or click here).
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:
The NRDC Action Fund spent a record $75,534 on Facebook ads last week, their most recent ads focusing on protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Although the Biden administration has acted to halt development in the sanctuary, the Action Fund is advocating for Congress to make such protection permanent. When it comes to the American Jobs Plan, though, they seem to be focusing on advocating for equitable climate action that includes replacing the nation’s lead pipes.
The biggest change in spending that we saw last week, though, came from Climate Power, which seems to have significantly shifted gears in their digital ad spending. They spent $71,272 last week (compared to $4,060 the previous week) through a new page, called “Climate Power Education Fund), that seems to just put money behind news stories that talk up clean energy and sound the alarm on climate change’s devastating consequences. They’re targeting a variety of states with these news ads, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Oregon, New Jersey, and Maine.
While Facebook ad spending across climate groups has stalled, we also saw polluters temper their spending on the platform, especially ExxonMobil, which nearly halved its spending from the previous week to last week. It appears that they’re running the same ads arguing against “tax hikes on American businesses,” albeit with a smaller budget, while the American Petroleum Institute’s Energy Citizens page is now focusing their pressure campaign on four representatives: Reps. Tom O’Halleran (AZ), Matt Cartwright (PA), Conor Lamb (PA), and Sharice Davids (KS).
YouTube + Google
While the League of Conservation Voters significantly stepped down their Facebook ad spending last week, that may have been due to the fact that they nearly doubled their already-high spending on Google and YouTube ads. They spent a whopping $158,000 on the platform last week, mostly on carefully geotargeted YouTube ads supporting various Democratic representatives. Check out their latest ad supporting Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema:
Snapchat
Climate groups did not start any new Snapchat political ad campaigns last week, but we did find that Amazon’s Climate Pledge has so far dropped $87,037 on ads targeting users that belong to categories like “Green Living Enthusiasts” and “Advocates and Activists.” These ads largely mirror the ads they’ve been running on Facebook for months.
Overall, here are the top spenders on climate ads on Snapchat so far this year:
Who’s driving the online conversation on climate change?
Last week, Hurricane Ida became the latest climate change-enhanced natural disaster to trigger calls from progressives and Democratic lawmakers for climate action. And, while right-wing outlets denounced activists’ concerns as an excuse for other perceived policy failures or “hysteria,” we again saw that stories of climate action - at least at the individual level - does well on Facebook.
The most-engaged Facebook posts about climate change and energy last week came from UNICEF, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and central California’s ABC30 Action News. This may seem like an unusual mix, since left-wing influencers like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich are usually leading the charge online, but these top three posts follow trends we’ve seen before. Posts about individuals’ extraordinary actions to combat climate change often do quite well, especially when a page (like UNICEF) has a large following. Additionally, ABC 30’s story was the second-most engaged story about climate change last week, second only to a federal judge undoing a Trump administration environmental rule yet again.
As for Tucker Carlson, his post is mostly about America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, but even here he found a way to cast doubt on climate action:
If you’re going to make big decisions, you have to be willing to suffer if they go wrong. In the spring of 1912, Edward Smith ran his ship into an iceberg in the North Atlantic. As they [sic] ship went down, Smith didn’t blame climate change for the disaster. He stood stoically in the wheelhouse and rode the Titanic to the bottom of the ocean.
Otherwise, the cross-country devastation by Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and New York drove the online conversation around climate change across platforms. On Facebook, President Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Occupy Democrats, and Bernie Sanders all used the storm’s devastation to highlight the need for climate action. We’d like to note, though, that right-wing media is continually pushing against this urgency by undermining climate science, as indicated by this PragerU post from last week that claims that “Hysteria helps no one.”
As we’ve seen before, dramatic imagery of climate change’s devastating consequences always does well on Instagram, and the flooding in NYC during Hurricane Ida is no different.
Additionally, the sentiment that “the alarmists have been right this whole time” was a popular one on Twitter last week since the end of America’s lost war in Afghanistan, the collapse of Roe v. Wade in Texas, and Hurricane Ida all coincided. Take a look at the top tweets mentioning climate change last week:
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.