Last week's top climate posts: July 11 - 17
Historic floods in Europe boost climate activists’ call for action
For starters, here are the top 3️⃣ performing posts across Facebook in the United States last week mentioning “climate change” or “global warming.” Despite coming from three very different messengers, all three hammer home the sentiment that we are not investing nearly enough in climate action.
Robert Reich, though, was not the only page to use ongoing environmental crises to call for climate action. Climate activists - such as Greta Thunberg, Bernie Sanders, and Lisa Neubauer - are using Facebook and Instagram to spread images of the historic catastrophic flooding in the lowlands of western Europe and emphasize how urgent the need is for climate action.
That said, most Facebook posts from mainstream U.S. outlets about the floods don’t explicitly connect these floods to climate change, and those that did seemed to have gotten lower levels of engagement than those that covered the floods without mentioning climate change. Take these two posts from the New York Times, both of which were about the floods and were posted at around the same time; one just covers the damage and deaths and got over 10k interactions, while the other that attributed the floods to climate change got under 500 interactions:
Here are the top 10 posts from climate and polluter groups on Facebook last week and the # of interactions each post received. Most of these posts celebrated the Biden administration’s move to fully restore and expand environmental protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.
Here are the top 10 posts from climate and polluter groups on Instagram last week and the # of interactions each post received. Many of Extinction Rebellion’s posts in this list turned Shark Week on its head to raise awareness for the alarming population decline among shark species around the world.
Finally, the top 10 tweets about climate last week came from the following accounts. Once again, many of these point to the floods in western Europe as yet another proof point for the urgent necessity for climate action.