Last week's top climate posts: August 29 - September 4
Hurricane Ida provided yet another proof point for urgent climate action
Last week, Hurricane Ida became the latest climate change-enhanced natural disaster to trigger calls from progressives and Democratic lawmakers for climate action. And, while right-wing outlets denounced activists’ concerns as an excuse for other perceived policy failures or “hysteria,” we again saw that stories of climate action - at least at the individual level - do well on Facebook.
The most-engaged Facebook posts about climate change and energy last week came from UNICEF, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and central California’s ABC30 Action News. This may seem like an unusual mix, since left-wing influencers like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert Reich are usually leading the charge online, but these top three posts follow trends we’ve seen before. Posts about individuals’ extraordinary actions to combat climate change often do quite well, especially when a page (like UNICEF) has a large following. Additionally, ABC 30’s story was the second-most engaged story about climate change last week, second only to a federal judge undoing a Trump administration environmental rule yet again.
As for Tucker Carlson, his post is mostly about America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, but even here he found a way to cast doubt on climate action:
If you’re going to make big decisions, you have to be willing to suffer if they go wrong. In the spring of 1912, Edward Smith ran his ship into an iceberg in the North Atlantic. As they [sic] ship went down, Smith didn’t blame climate change for the disaster. He stood stoically in the wheelhouse and rode the Titanic to the bottom of the ocean.
Otherwise, the cross-country devastation by Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and New York drove the online conversation around climate change across platforms. On Facebook, President Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Occupy Democrats, and Bernie Sanders all used the storm’s devastation to highlight the need for climate action. We’d like to note, though, that right-wing media is continually pushing against this urgency by undermining climate science, as indicated by this PragerU post from last week that claims that “Hysteria helps no one.”
As we’ve seen before, dramatic imagery of climate change’s devastating consequences always does well on Instagram, and the flooding in NYC during Hurricane Ida is no different.
Additionally, the sentiment that “the alarmists have been right this whole time” was a popular one on Twitter last week since the end of America’s lost war in Afghanistan, the collapse of Roe v. Wade in Texas, and Hurricane Ida all coincided.
Take a look at the top tweets mentioning climate change last week: