Last week's top climate posts: June 27 - July 3
Secretary Granholm once again targeted by climate deniers online
For starters, here are the top 3 performing posts across Facebook in the United States last week mentioning “climate change” or “global warming.” The top two posts, from historian Heather Cox Richardson, discuss the state of the American Jobs Plan and American governments’ fossil fuel subsidies. The next top post about climate change comes from none other than Dan Bongino, who once again used remarks from Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to disregard any consideration of the impacts of climate change.
Bongino’s post is just one of many in a right-wing online outrage cycle that was spawned merely by a CNN anchor asking Granholm if climate change played a role in the condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., to which the Secretary responded, “We don’t know fully.” Ironically, Fox News (once you look past its own bad-faith framing) comprehensively chronicled how right-wing online pundits turned the otherwise unremarkable interview into yet another source of outrage for their audiences.
It does seem the online push by Bongino and others was somewhat successful: public Facebook posts about the Secretary got over 175k interactions, a spike in engagement second only to the last time right-wing pages went after her in May during the Colonial Pipeline shutdown, when posts about her got a cumulative 554k interactions.
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:
Among climate pages on Facebook, the most-engaged post last week came from Climate Reality, about the recent revelation that Exxon has been heavily working lawmakers - especially the senators involved in the recent bipartisan infrastructure package - to hobble the federal government’s climate action. Other posts from Climate Reality also overperformed on Facebook, especially those addressing recent extreme heat waves around the world.
On Instagram, the top post among climate groups last week came from the Sunrise Movement concerning their recent sit-in around the White House. They were protesting to push for more robust climate action from both the Administration and Congress, and their demonstration even got a spot on MSNBC.