Democrats, climate activists ringing alarm bells online as heat crushes Pacific Northwest
Sanders, Inslee the biggest online advocates while other Dems work the press
It bears repeating that the heat wave currently bearing down on Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia is a historic weather event, and as such, people are talking about it on social media. CrowdTangle estimates that there have been 12,964 public posts about the heat wave in the past week, with the most-engaged posts coming from news outlets and influencers. Several climate-oriented Facebook pages and Democratic officials, meanwhile, are actively linking the dangerous weather event to man-made climate change, especially Sen. Bernie Sanders and Gov. Jay Inslee.
Here are the top 10 posts about the heat wave from pages other than news outlets and influencers, and how many interactions each post got:
Other climate-oriented pages, like the ones we normally track, have also made similar posts connecting the heat wave to the climate crisis, but with significantly less engagement. Climate Reality and 350.org are two such pages, but their posts only got just over 1k interactions.
While climate groups themselves may not be the biggest drivers of the conversation around the heat wave online, they are getting air cover from President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom. At a meeting today to discuss the current wildfire season - itself exacerbated by already dry conditions - the two Democratic leaders used the heat wave and other extreme weather events to push for appropriate climate action.
At the meeting, Biden pushed for the recent “bipartisan infrastructure framework” that the White House is trying to sell to the public: “‘We also have to make investments in our future,’ Biden said at a meeting on Wednesday. ‘That’s why the bipartisan infrastructure framework investment of about $50 billion ... is going to build resilience to extreme weather events like wildfires. $50 billion.’”
Newsom, on the other hand, was more blunt: “I should just say this with due respect to those that don't believe in science, you got to believe your own damn eyes, observe the evidence.”
On the right, climate-skeptical pages and their followers are drawing different conclusions from the oppressive heat wave. Among the most prominent of these pages, the most-engaged post among these unsurprisingly came from Fox News, but judging from the reactions and comments, we suspect that most of the engagement was driven by incredulity more than anything else.
Two other posts about the heat wave from climate-skeptic Facebook pages also came from Fox News, but they underperformed significantly on engagement. This indicates to us that even when the outlet has posted about the event, their followers simply aren’t interested, especially when compared to, say, a post about a Black athlete disregarding the national anthem, which overperformed their average content by more than 50 times.
Breitbart also posted exactly once about the heat wave, basically just transcribing President Biden’s other recent remarks on the heat wave, but again, the comments on the story indicate that their readers are not taking his remarks seriously or in good faith (and the comments after the ones below devolve into rank homophobia following the mention of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg).