Last week's top climate posts: July 4-10
Competitive Enterprise Institute ragged on federal regulation and spending
For starters, here are the top 3 performing posts across Facebook in the United States last week mentioning “climate change” or “global warming.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, like other climate groups in recent weeks, has been using recent extreme weather events to highlight the need for bold climate action on social media. Several of the most-engaged posts last week that mentioned climate change came from one of the senator’s Facebook pages.
Here are the top 10 posts from climate and polluter groups on Facebook last week and the # of interactions each post received:
Here are the top 10 posts from climate and polluter groups on Instagram last week and the # of interactions each post received:
The Competitive Enterprise Institute - which proudly declares on its website how it was “instrumental in defeating ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, defeating enactment of the 2009 Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, and convincing President Trump to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate treaty” - made the most-engaged post among climate and skeptic Facebook pages we’re tracking. They used some hand-waving math in an apparent effort to convince voters that the “cost of federal regulations” is exorbitantly large by comparing said “cost” to how much the U.S spends on things like aircraft carriers and the total cost of the 2020 elections.
These two posts wildly overperformed CEI’s typical posts. Many of their recent Facebook posts usually only get a handful of interactions, but these reached into the thousands. It’s difficult to say exactly why these posts did so well, but we suspect that their success could be attributed to the relatively high number of people shared the post, leading to the dramatic and misleading claim reaching an unusually high number of eyeballs for CEI.
Meanwhile, over on Instagram, Extinction Rebellion seems to have found significant success with a variety of posts, the top one of which put a face - an Ethiopian-British doctor - to climate change’s disproportionate effects on the Global South, a post that overperformed their typical content by 8.5 times. Another of their posts that overperformed simply reposted a Twitter thread to an Instagram slideshow.
Similarly, Sunrise Movement and NRDC used straightforward slideshows to advocate for a Climate Conservation Corps and the replacement of America’s lead pipes with the American Jobs Plan.