Last week's top climate posts: July 25 - 31
Looking at the most-engaged climate + infrastructure posts
For starters, here are the top 3 performing posts across Facebook in the United States last week mentioning a variety of keywords, including climate change, global warming, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, civilian climate corps, and Green New Deal.
Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to drive a huge portion of the conversation around climate change on Facebook, as does President Joe Biden - although the success of Biden's post probably had more to do with his meeting with the Iraqi prime minister than his passing mention of climate change. Breitbart also continued to drive a fair amount of climate-skeptic engagement, and we’ve got more on that below.
Over the weekend, the U.S. Senate advanced a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. The bill, formally called the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, still has to go through an amendments process and needs to get final passage from both chambers of Congress, but the White House and its allies are set to promote the package during Congress’ August recess.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the top posts about infrastructure and the American Jobs Plan - however one defines it - across the major social media platforms from the past week.
On Facebook, Biden’s Facebook page has been driving the conversation around infrastructure, but only one of the below posts from him mentions climate change - the rest focus on highlighting the package’s bipartisan nature. The top 10 Facebook posts overall about infrastructure came from the following pages:
Breitbart’s highly engaged Facebook post complaining about 17 GOP senators voting to move the infrastructure package forward - accusing them of a “HISTORIC REPUBLICAN PARTY BETRAYAL” - also did remarkably well on Instagram.
The far-right outlet drove the conversation around infrastructure on the platform last week, having made seven of the top 10 most engaged posts about infrastructure on Instagram:
Predictably, the discussion on Twitter around the infrastructure package is being driven by major left-wing and Democratic figures, including the president, Robert Reich, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Kyle Griffin. While the most viral tweet came from a Canadian city planner celebrating a Dutch aqueduct/water bridge, one tweet from Daily Beast reporter Scott Bixby comparing Biden’s huge infrastructure proposal to the bipartisan agreement got over 1,700 quote tweets that almost unanimously denounce bipartisanship.
We’d also like to note that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s statement opposing a $3.5 trillion reconciliation package over the topline number - while still signaling support for a smaller version - was simultaneously denounced by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter while it was lauded by the likes of Mike Huckabee on Facebook. Both the congresswoman and the former governor seem to have gotten a lot of engagement out of the story thanks to the intense frustration or joy the story generated for their audiences.
Overall, here are the top 10 tweets about infrastructure from the past week:
Across platforms, President Biden and the White House seem to be the biggest drivers of positive conversation across platforms around the pending infrastructure package. Meanwhile, it seems that there’s an opportunity for proponents of the bill to talk it up on both Instagram and Twitter, where detractors from both the left and the right are prominent - and likely won’t be going away any time soon.