Obama took the spotlight in COP26’s final days
Looking at last week's top climate posts: November 7th - 13th
The top 3 performing posts mentioning climate or energy issues on Facebook last week came from Barack Obama (134.5k interactions), Barack Obama (92.3k interactions), and Newsmax (82k interactions).
Former President Barack Obama’s presence at COP26 generated a significant amount of engagement around climate change and the international summit itself. Not only did a good few of the top Facebook and Instagram posts about climate come from the previous president, but several other highly-engaged Facebook posts and news articles also referenced some of his remarks. Right-wing and mainstream media alike latched onto his criticisms of former President Donald Trump’s anti-climate actions; we estimate that these articles, coming from outlets including Newsmax, NBC News, Forbes, Breitbart, Axios, generated at least 65.9k interactions.
Overall, the top three Instagram posts about climate change and related terms came from Barack Obama (405.3k interactions), Barack Obama (372.8k interactions), and Mark Ruffalo (225.9k interactions). Other highly-engaged Instagram posts that mentioned climate change highlighted the natural impacts of human activity: mounds of discarded clothes in Chile (77k interactions); a precarious revival of life in the River Thames (53.8k interactions); threatened polar bears in northern Manitoba, Canada (50.8k interactions); and Tuvalu’s foreign minister delivering a speech at COP26 while knee-deep in tidewater (41.3k interactions).
Finally, here were the top three tweets mentioning climate and related terms last week. All of them are sharply critical of the kind of withering excuses and mediocre climate action commitments from the world’s nations. Two other highly engaged tweets came from Greta Thunberg, who advocated for raising the declared global threat level of climate change and for democracy itself.