Last week's top climate posts: August 15 - 21
Looking at the most-engaged climate + infrastructure posts
The conversation about climate change on social media seemed to mostly revolve around four stories, each of which generated tens of thousands of interactions:
1) rain on the summit of Greenland;
2) a Utah high school teacher getting fired after ranting against climate deniers and Donald Trump, among other things, which was made viral by own-the-lib types like Glenn Beck, The Blaze, and The Daily Wire;
3) a federal judge in Alaska blocking a ConocoPhillips oil drilling project in the state; and
4) a New York Times opinion essay by Greta Thunberg and other child climate activists.
While the most-interacted single posts that mention climate change came from the likes of UNICEF and celebrities like Ian Somerhalder and Michael Moore (whose posts are only tangentially related to climate change in any case), the above four stories generated more engagement overall across posts and articles on Facebook. For example, the most-engaged post about climate change’s influence on warming weather in Greenland only received just under 10k interactions, but across all articles and outlets, the story got nearly 390k interactions, most of which came from straight news outlets like CNN, NPR, and Reuters.
The same could be said about the judiciary blocking the ConocoPhillips project in Alaska that was initially approved under the Trump administration. The story generated at least 92k interactions, driven largely by articles from NPR, Axios, and the Washington Post.
While engagement around these two big climate and clean energy developments was mostly driven by straight news outlets, climate deniers used more personal stories to lambast the climate movement, earning themselves similar levels of engagement in the process.
The guest opinion piece in the New York Times by Thunberg and other child climate activists generated a lot of buzz on social media. In fact, the Times’ Instagram post for the piece was one of the most-engaged posts about climate change on the platform last week, second only to posts from climber-influencer Alex Honnold.
That said, a story from The Daily Wireundermining Thunberg et al’s argument by citing a bogus “There is no climate emergency” declaration got over 51k interactions after shares from Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Matt Walsh.
Over on Twitter last week, the most-engaged tweets about climate change came from high-level folks like Bernie Sanders, Pope Francis, and others advocating for climate action (or despairing about the overwhelming nature of the crisis). Former Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell also gives us an insight into how climate deniers might use the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to undermine the Biden administration’s bold initiatives at home.