Last week's top climate posts: August 10th-17th
Right-wing media drove the conversation around domestic oil production
The climate conversation on social media last week was defined by three main narratives: (1) global wildfires are a direct result of the climate crisis, (2) the infrastructure bill(s) will help solve the climate crisis, and (3) Biden is refusing to increase domestic oil production. Facebook was (unsurprisingly) dominated by right-wing content, while pro-climate advocates won the week on Instagram.
What we’re seeing on Facebook 👎
Unfortunately, the most engaging Facebook posts mentioning climate and energy topics last week came from conservative sources and climate skeptics who criticized the Biden admin on oil production.
While the single most engaged post on the platform was from Joe Biden touting CA Gov. Gavin Newsom, most of the top posts were right-wing pages like Fox News, Kevin McCarthy, and Ben Shapiro. As you can see from the posts below, this oil production story from FOX News dominated Facebook engagement last week.
Other top Facebook posts were from PragerU, which posted an outright anti-climate statement calling climate change “hysteria,” and Bernie Sanders, who shared a previous post tying global wildfires to climate change.
What’s happening on Instagram 📸
Meanwhile, on Instagram, posts tended to lean more towards climate advocates’ favor. Last week, the top-performing post related to climate and energy topics was a photo post from @beautifuldestinations tying Turkish wildfires to the climate crisis. To date, it’s received over 1 million interactions.
Other top-performing posts similarly highlight the wildfire situation. The below posts from Bernie Sanders, CNN, and Greenpeace all reinforced the same narrative, and received hundreds of thousands of interactions.
The conversation on Twitter 🤳
…and lastly, here are the top 5 tweets about climate and energy last week - all came from climate advocates. The tweet with the most interactions was a clever comment about mask use and C02 levels:
Others came from journalists Emily Atkin and Lucy Diavolo, in addition to Robert Reich and Bernie Sanders: