Last week's top climate posts: October 17 - 23
Pro-climate action content on slight reach downturn as right-wing pundits lie about the motivation for Democrats’ positions (CW: artistic nudity)
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Vice President Kamala Harris (24.3k interactions), Bloomberg Opinion (22.3k interactions), and the U.S. Department of Energy (21.1k interactions).
While the most-engaged post about climate change last week came from Harris, we found that Sean Hannity deployed a common counter-narrative against her recent trip to Lake Mead in a post last week that got 10k interactions. He asserted her as a hypocrite by pointing out that she used combustion-engine vehicles to make the trip. This rhetorical tactic fits with a video from Glenn Beck last week that got 11.7k interactions and 133k views, in which he argues that “President Biden wants to fundamentally change our economy. This is about control, not about climate or anything else.”
The most-engaged article about climate change and clean energy last week was a Daily Wire story implicitly celebrating Joe Manchin’s completely unsurprising resistance to a carbon tax, a pay-for proposal that was on the table for Democrats for less than an afternoon. Nonetheless, the article got 28.9k interactions on Facebook, largely thanks to shares from Ben Shapiro (“Manchin is making himself abundantly clear.”), United American Patriots (“I can't believe it ... a DEMOCRAT is now one of my favorite people! 😳”), and Matt Walsh (“He's not budging off his non-negotiables.”)
When it comes to the best-performing Facebook content from Democrats and advocates for climate action, familiar accounts were the ones driving the message. Aside from Harris and the DoE up top, we saw posts from Joe Biden, The White House, and Jeff Merkley get relatively high engagement of about 15k interactions each. They each underlined the importance of climate action, but Merkley was more direct than the president: “Anyone who says we can't afford to take action on climate is lying to you.”
Overall, here were the top three most engaged posts on Instagram mentioning climate or energy issues last week. The third post won’t embed into Substack, but you can find it here; Dan Crenshaw used a Joe Rogan clip to advance his radical anti-climate views, fitting into with the narrative we mentioned above; that Democrats are lying about their climate convictions to advance legislation that would “control” Americans.
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week. The most-engaged tweet and several other highly-engaged tweets mentioning climate change came from Hyundai in its partnership social media campaign with BTS. The k-pop group’s fan base is extremely active on Twitter, so we’re not at all surprised to see that this campaign from Hyundai has gotten as much engagement as it has.