Last week's top climate posts: September 5 - 11
Online Right derided Biden’s tour of hurricane-drenched New Jersey, wildfire-scorched West
In the past week, President Joe Biden has been hitting the road to advocate for climate action, from the scorched West to the drenched East. Indeed, the top Facebook post mentioning climate change came from former Pres. Barack Obama, who lauded the latest Obama Foundation Scholars (receiving 81.9k interactions), but the next-most engaged post came from Biden on the day he toured a New Jersey community recently ravaged by Hurricane Ida. That post received 79.7k interactions:
However, some residents had a few choice words for him, mostly about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. In response, Republicans and right-wing media alike took the opportunity to turn the screws on the president. Breitbart, Fox News, and Newsmax (with an interview with RNC chair Ronna McDaniel) all ran with it, creating some of the most-engaged content about climate change last week:
Also during the tour, Biden misspoke about his administration’s target for net-zero emissions, which both Western Journal and Breitbart took as an opportunity to undermine the president’s message, and Dan Bongino responded to other remarks from Biden about climate change as the “massive climate change lie,” citing a Wall Street Journal op-ed. On top of that, Ted Nugent, the country star-turned-Trump fanatic - also made one of the most-engaged Facebook posts about climate change last week, likely because he channeled exactly how hardcore Trump supporters feel about Democrats’ pleas for climate action: with intensely vulgar distrust.
On Instagram, some of the most engaged posts about climate change were also connected to the hurricane damage in the Northeast, including one post from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that got over 263k interactions. Another top post came from the Washington Post, about a new carbon pulldown facility in Iceland. It got over 64.4k interactions, again telling us that posts about breakthroughs in climate action tend to perform well on social media.
In our search for top-performing clean jobs content, we found that a group of professional outdoor athletes organized by a nonprofit called Protect Our Winters - or #pow for short - are using their platforms to advocate for climate action in Democrats’ reconciliation bill. One could consider these athletes microinfluencers, and they provide a unique opportunity to reach typically non-political audiences with political ideas they might be sympathetic to, such as pursuing climate action to preserve outdoor sports for generations to come.
And lastly, here are the top five tweets mentioning climate change and related terms from last week: