GOP group uses YouTube ads to prop up Manchin + stop clean energy
Also inside: A look at LCV’s young volunteer recruitment campaign
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!
TL;DR:
The League of Conservation Voters is using memes and TikToks in new Facebook and Instagram ads in key states to recruit young activists into their volunteer program.
EDF Action spent nearly $9k last week on fundraising ads benefiting the candidate that is running to unseat the current chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission.
America Next, a group founded by Bobby Jindal, spent over $30k last week on YouTube ads in West Virginia praising Sen. Joe Manchin for opposing clean energy investments and urging him to do so again.
Democrats ran digital ads commemorating Earth Day last week; Republicans continued their calls for “energy independence.”
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, we saw spending on Meta political ads by climate groups grow by about 30 percent from the previous week. Most of that increased spending can be attributed to national groups - including Defenders of Wildlife, EDF, Greenpeace, NRDC, and Sierra Club - running Earth Day fundraising campaigns nationwide.
The League of Conservation Voters has launched a significant youth outreach and volunteer recruitment campaign targeting Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. They’re promoting memes nationwide and a TikTok made by one of their volunteers to adults under 25 in each of those states.
On top of their Earth Day fundraising, Greenpeace launched a campaign to end neighborhood drilling in California. They’re mostly targeting older women in the Golden State arguing that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s move to halt new oil and gas drilling “within 3,200 feet of communities” fails to address the sites that “continue to put Californians and their neighbors at risk.” And in Texas, EDF Action has launched nationwide fundraising ads on behalf of Luke Warford, who’s running to unseat the chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission.
The biggest investors in Meta political ads among polluters last week were the American Chemistry Council and the American Petroleum Institute, which together spent another $158k on the platform. They are both still running campaigns calling on Congress to “support a comprehensive plan for recycling plastics” and claiming that “American energy production is critical for strengthening national security and energy supply.” API also launched a new 30-second video ad targeting voters in Ohio, Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
Overall, here’s a look at how weekly spending on Meta political ads by climate groups and polluters compares week-over-week so far this year:
Google + YouTube
We identified six climate and energy groups that ran political ads on Google platforms last week, according to the Google Transparency Report. Here’s how their spending breaks down:
The newest group to run energy-related ads is a conservative group called America Next, which was founded by former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal in 2013. Their latest YouTube ad targets West Virginia, and praises Sen. Joe Manchin for stopping “Biden’s bad budget” on the grounds that the president wants to “cut Medicare to pay for his liberal environmental agenda.” Check it out:
Snapchat
Last week, Patagonia launched a new campaign promoting a new documentary that profiles Newtok, Alaska, a tiny Yup’ik village on the Bering Sea that has to move everything upriver to escape rising sea levels. Overall, here’s a breakdown of how much climate and conservation groups have spent on Snap ads so far this year:
Climate & energy ads in the 2022 elections
Out of some of the most competitive races across the country, we picked up a few new and ongoing Facebook ad campaigns from top candidates:
CO-8: Republican Lori Saine launched an ad attacking Democrat Yadira Caraveo, claiming that she is “a dangerous Marxist whose vision for America is a socialist nightmare: our energy industry destroyed, our borders open to all, ‘woke’ schools, and inflation inducing endless government handouts.” This is taking place in the newly-created CD-08, which has one of the largest Latino electorates in the country and could be competitive this fall.
GA-GOV: Stacey Abrams ran a video ad featuring testimonials from young supporters for Earth Day, targeting young adults in the state: “Our earth is hurting, and whether you’re in Savannah or in Dalton, we all need clean water, we all need clean air, and we all need a safe space to grow up and thrive…If we work together, we can secure a future for ourselves and our planet. And we need a governor who will take action now. We need Stacey Abrams.”
PA-GOV: In a transparent attempt to snag Trump’s endorsement, Dave White is running an ad exclusively in Florida praising the former president and saying how he wants to “make us energy independent again.”
PA-SEN: Mehmet Oz launched a new ad to promote his endorsements from Donald Trump and Sean Hannity, the latter of whom called the candidate “the America First candidate…strong on energy independence.”
WI-SEN: Alex Lasry ran an Earth Day ad with his young daughter as the focus: “We cannot continue to put profits over our planet & our future. It's time to take bold climate action, create millions of jobs, expand economic opportunity, and lower costs for working Americans.”
Reaching Frontline Communities
Conservation Colorado has spent over $2k on a Facebook + Instagram ad campaign supporting HB 22-1244, which would grant local regulatory authorities to adopt more stringent rules than similar regulations outlined in the Clean Air Act. Mostly targeting young men in the state, Conservation Colorado argues that the bill is necessary because “Air pollution in Colorado is at dangerous levels, causing chronic respiratory illness and other health problems for impacted communities. Yet our state doesn't have the tools to protect families from pollutants that are in the air.”
Tracking Climate Disinfo Online
Triplecheck identified approximately 400 tweets with more than 10 retweets and 140 Facebook posts with more than 10 engagements that contained misinformation or toxic narratives related to the environment from April 19, 2022, through April 25, 2022. More than five million people were exposed to this content on Twitter during the time period reviewed, an increase from last week's exposure levels. The content had over 46,000 engagements on Facebook, an increase 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 themes below:
Biden, Obama are hypocrites for calling for action on climate change while flying on private jets
1,500,000 human accounts exposed on Twitter
Over 1,500 engagements on Facebook.
Energy-efficient military vehicles will make America weaker
2,500,000 human accounts exposed on Twitter
Over 1,900 engagements on Facebook.
Climate change is a hoax and a scam
970,000 human accounts exposed on Twitter
Over 5,100 engagements on Facebook.
Twitter is censoring content exposing the truth about climate change
640,000 human accounts exposed on Twitter
Over 3,300 engagements on Facebook.
EPA used Covid recovery funds to push “environmental justice”
Minimal Twitter engagement identified
Over 4,100 engagements on Facebook.
These narratives were also the focus of approximately 55 percent of the Facebook engagements. You can find the full report here.
Measuring the National Organic Conversation
The most-engaged Facebook posts mentioning climate change, energy, or conservation last week almost all had something to do with Earth Day. All told, though, engagement on these posts was significantly lower compared to the previous week - for example, last week’s top relevant post from Occupy Democrats got over 36k interactions, while their top relevant post the previous week got over 70k interactions. FWIW, the most-engaged post about energy from a polluter came from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who bragged about increased drilling as “Texas doing its part to lower the cost of fuel.”
Climate-related content got much more engagement on Instagram than on Facebook last week. Many if not all of the most-engaged posts we found had still to do with Earth Day as actors, brands, musicians, and others like Coldplay and Qatar Airways used the occasion to talk up their own climate commitments. The best-performing posts about climate and energy from a skeptic page again came from the_typical_liberal, who criticized Bill Maher for his “climate nonsense” in a post about Maher bemoaning mask usage.
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.