Elon Musk fuels high engagement on pro-fossil fuel content post-invasion
Plus, we look at new digital ads from API and a Virginia coalition fighting to protect clean energy
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 several dozen groups and corporations from the past week, as well as their activities on social media. Tell your colleagues to subscribe here!
What we found:
Sierra Club is targeting West Virginia with Facebook and Instagram ads calling on Sen. Joe Manchin to pass the Build Back Better Act for the clean energy investments it would bring to his state.
Three local conservation and clean energy groups in Virginia are coordinating on a digital ad campaign to protect clean energy progress from the newly empowered Republicans in Richmond.
The American Petroleum Institute launched its first Facebook ad campaign since Russia invaded Ukraine, and their ads unsurprisingly connect “energy independence” with national security.
The Southern Environmental Law Center is targeting coastal states in the Southeast with Facebook and Instagram ads promoting a highly detailed interactive map showing how climate change will impact the states’ coastal communities and ecosystems.
Arguments for increased domestic fossil fuel production are still pervasive on social media following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, especially since Elon Musk came out in favor of said production.
National Digital Ad Spending on Climate
First, here are the top 25 spenders nationwide on climate and energy-related ads on Meta platforms from last week:
Last week, climate groups made a moderate increase in their investment in Meta political ads of about 12 percent, in large part due to new campaigns promoting clean energy and climate action at the state level, with some coming from national groups. Among these is The Nature Conservancy, which relaunched its “We are nature” campaign from late last year that seeks to connect natural health to personal health and environmental justice. And like last year, the campaign is still primarily targeted at adults under 35 in California, New York, New Jersey, and Arizona. Additionally, Sierra Club is now up with Facebook ads targeting Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia to support the Build Back Better Act. These ads, which primarily target older residents in the state, implicitly argue that by failing to pass the package, Manchin is letting his state “miss out on billions of dollars in critical investments in our people, our communities, and our economy.”
We’ve also noticed a new coordinated digital ad campaign in Virginia between the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network Action Fund, and Advanced Energy Works to fight for continued clean energy investments in the Commonwealth. Each of these three groups is now running Facebook and Instagram video ads targeting Virginians under 45 that read: “Virginia has made huge progress on clean energy. But Republicans in Richmond are trying to take us backwards. On clean air to clean cars, for more clean energy jobs and lower electric bills. We need you to tell [STATE LAWMAKER] to protect Virginia’s clean energy progress.”
Last week, we reported that the American Petroleum Institute, despite how they pushed pro-fossil fuel talking points almost immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine, had yet to run corresponding digital ads. On March 4th, their tactics changed. The API, under their Energy Citizens page, started running Facebook and Instagram ads promoting American oil and natural gas as “crucial for our energy independence.” This is a nationwide campaign, but we’ll note that their targeting seems to be correlated with states’ non-renewable energy production; the most-targeted states of their new campaign include Pennsylvania, Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, and Virginia. Similarly, Power the Future, a fossil-fuel advocacy group founded by conservative operative Daniel Turner, has spent nearly $7k on ads attacking Sens. Ben Ray Luján, Michael Bennet, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown, John Hickenlooper, and Martin Heinrich.
Overall, here’s a look at how weekly spending on Meta political ads by climate groups and polluters compare week-over-week so far this year:
Google + YouTube
Clearpath Action Fund is continuing its Google ad campaign supporting Sen. Lisa Murkowski for “bringing energy innovation home to Alaska.” At the same time, they’re also supporting Rep. Dan Newhouse of WA-04 using similar rhetoric. All told, the group has spent $7,700 on these campaigns over the past two weeks, but we did not identify any other new or ongoing campaigns from relevant groups in the most recent Google Transparency Report.
Snapchat
Renew Oregon concluded its Climate Resiliency Budget campaign this week, and the NRDC Action Fund is continuing its acquisition campaign on Snapchat until April 1st, but otherwise, there were no new or ongoing campaigns from climate groups on the platform over the past week. Overall, here are the top spenders on Snapchat ads related to climate change, clean energy, and conservation so far this year:
Climate, clean energy, and conservation ads in this year’s key states
Out of the biggest races in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we picked up a couple of new and ongoing Facebook ad campaigns from top candidates:
GA-SEN: Herschel Walker is once again using Facebook ads to criticize the Biden administration over gas prices, this time through the Russia-Ukraine lens: “We’re boycotting Russian vodka, but still buying Russian oil. It’s time to UNLEASH America’s energy potential... it’s time for AMERICAN oil on AMERICAN soil! Are you with me??” The ad includes a gif featuring a Chevron station pricing gas at $6.71/gallon with the stickers reading “Welcome to #Bidenezuela” and “Let’s go Brandon.”
NC-SEN: Ted Budd has spent under $100 on a simple text-only ad: “Joe Biden’s solution to our record gas prices, which stem from well before the Ukraine invasion, is to purchase oil from the Communist Party of Venezuela when instead he should be focusing on suspending the federal gas tax, increasing our domestic oil production, releasing more petroleum from our reserves, and opening the keystone pipeline. Don’t allow anyone to say that Presidents don’t affect gas prices. It’s a slap in the face to our economy and every single American citizen who has escaped the horrors of Maduro’s communist regime.”
NH-SEN: Maggie Hassan is still using climate change as a primary fundraising plank: “If we let Republicans take back the Senate, that means giving up all our hard-earned efforts for reproductive rights, climate change and voting rights.”
Reaching Frontline Communities
Last week, the Southern Environmental Law Center launched a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign highlighting “how we can protect historic communities, rich biodiversity, and precious natural resources on the Southeastern coast” from rising sea levels. The campaign promotes their new, highly detailed interactive map that shows how climate change will impact coastal areas from the Chesapeake Bay to the Florida panhandle. For the most part, this campaign targets young adult women in North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. SELC has spent at least $20.5k on this campaign so far.
Tracking Climate Disinfo Online
Tracking identified approximately 590 tweets with more than 10 retweets and 150 Facebook posts with more than 10 engagements that contained misinformation or toxic narratives related to the environment from March 02, 2022, through March 08, 2022. More than 8.9 million people were exposed to this content on Twitter during the time period reviewed, a decrease from last week's exposure levels, and the content had over 82,000 engagements on Facebook, a decrease from last week's exposure levels.
Approximately 90 percent of the people exposed to misinformation or toxic narratives related to the environment on Twitter were exposed to one of the following themes:
Environmentalists want oil produced by Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, not by American companies;
European countries would like to buy US oil in order to be able to isolate Russia, but climate change policies have made that impossible;
America’s energy policy changed after Greta Thunberg admonished world leaders at the UN General Assembly in 2019.
President Biden paused US oil and gas leases the same day Russia invaded Ukraine.
These narratives were also the focus of approximately 70 percent of the Facebook engagements identified in our tracking. You can find Triplecheck’s full report here.
Measuring the National Organic Conversation
Overall, the top three Facebook posts mentioning climate change and related terms last week came from a car fan page called DIYAuto.com (217.8k interactions), Fox News (210k interactions), and Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Jim Renacci (155.8k interactions).
Most of the highly engaged posts about energy were about boosting American fossil fuel production, and these vastly outperformed the best-performing posts about climate change last week. Content about Elon Musk’s support for said production did particularly well; in addition to the Fox News post above, Business Insider, The Patriots Gazette, and another post from Fox News each got over 100k interactions. A post from Franklin Graham - that may as well have been written by API - called energy independence “a national security issue,” called on the Biden administration to “finish the Keystone XL Pipeline and get it open as fast as we can” and got 132.9k interactions. Similarly, a video post from Breitbart carrying water for North Dakota Sen. Jim Hoeven saying “Without Biden’s restriction, ‘My state alone’ can make up most of Russian oil import,” got 78.7k interactions and 576.1k views.
By comparison, a post from Robert Reich calling for a transition away from fossil fuels got just 36.7k interactions.
Over on Instagram, the top three posts mentioning climate change and related terms came from Dua Lipa, CNN, and the_typical_liberal. While the highest-performing Instagram posts relating to climate change and energy didn’t have quite the same huge reach as the pro-fossil fuels Facebook posts above, memes about rising gas prices and right-wing punditry criticizing Biden were similarly pervasive. We also noticed that a local TV news report out of northern Alabama about the abundance of Joe Biden “I did that” stickers at gas stations got picked up by the likes of the_typical_liberal and Dan Bongino. Perhaps the only account countering these climate-denying voices is National Geographic, which made several highly engaged posts last week about the impacts of climate change.
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 nick@fwiwmedia.com.