Last week's top climate posts: October 3 - 9
Bears Ears protection advocates celebrate + activists disrupt Paris Fashion Week as right-wingers pillory Biden admin over oil prices
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Occupy Democrats (85.7k interactions), U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (71.9k interactions), and President Joe Biden (45.5k interactions).
It’s not surprising to us that Warren’s post about Biden restoring protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante got a relatively high level of engagement, since a Washington Post story about the move was also the most-engaged article about climate change and related topics last week, earning over 130k interactions.
We also noticed that one climate activist’s disruption of Paris Fashion Week with a banner that read “OVERCONSUMPTION = EXTINCTION” got a fair amount of traction on social media. Stories about her protest and dramatic removal - including from outlets like The Cut, CNN, and the New York Times - by security got just over 12k interactions, and a post about it from HIGHSNOBIETY was the second-most engaged Instagram post about climate last week. Additionally, an IG video from NowThis got over 341k views, and a similar Facebook video from them got another 861k views. NYTimes Fashion also picked up the event, and their IG post performed about as well as their post about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s TAX THE RICH dress.
Additionally, a few of the top Instagram posts about climate change came from Speaker Nancy Pelosi during her recent visit to Italy. There, she participated in a preliminary COP26 meeting and met with the country’s president and prime minister, apparently advocating for climate action all along the way.
Overall, here were the top three most engaged posts on Instagram mentioning climate or energy issues last week:
Before we wrap up, we’d like to point out that right-wing pundits didn’t seem to focus on climate change last week. We only identified a couple of high-performing posts from the likes of The Daily Wire et al; the most-engaged right-wing Facebook post about climate came from Mike Huckabee, but it only got 11.4k interactions. It also looks like their machine tried to manufacture a controversy over the Biden administration’s efforts to accelerate the clean energy transition. The most successful manifestation of this last week was a Breitbart article pointing out the rising price of crude oil that got 38.2k interactions across Facebook and Twitter, while a Daily Wire story and a Daily Caller IG post only got 8.5k and 11.7k interactions, respectively.
Finally, here were the top 3 tweets mentioning climate or energy issues from the last week. It looks like Democrats in Congress are using social media to more openly push for a robust economic agenda that includes strong climate action.