One year later: The Great Texas Freeze endures in digital ads
How groups and politicians are using last year’s deadly grid failure to advocate for better - or the same
Welcome to Climate Monitor, your weekly digest of the digital tactics and strategies that polluters and climate-action groups are deploying online to shift public opinion and move legislation. We’ve examined political ad spending on platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Google by several dozen groups and corporations from the past week, as well as their activities on social media. Tell your colleagues to subscribe here!
What we found:
A Steyer-backed group has spent nearly $50k on ads arguing to Texans that the state’s dedication to fossil fuels challenges residents’ energy independence.
Beto O’Rourke has run dozens of digital ads about last year’s freeze, from connecting the grid failure to Big Oil campaign contributions to Greg Abbott’s re-election campaign, to organizing a statewide fundraising drive around the storm’s anniversary.
Meanwhile, Abbott, the Texas Oil and Gas Association, and PragerU have all run ads arguing to Texans and folks nationwide that fossil fuels are still the best fuel source, and that renewable energy is the true that.
Social media activity around the anniversary of the storm appeared minimal, as the most-engaged Facebook post about this year’s cold weather in Texas was a meme about going “outside in flip flops and shorts to turn off the faucets,” which only got ~18.3k interactions.
Climate disinformation last week was entirely focused on portraying climate action as disingenuous or dangerous, according to an analysis from Triplecheck.
National Digital Ad Spending on Climate
First, here are the top 25 spenders nationwide on climate and energy-related ads on Meta platforms from last week:
Nearly one year ago today, Winter Storm Uri froze Texas, and the subsequent energy demand for heat caused a deregulated, unwinterized energy grid to fail for days as at least 246 Texans died. Since then, Texas lawmakers, ERCOT, and the Railroad Commission of Texas did next to nothing to prepare the grid for similar scenarios this year, but thankfully Mother Nature seems to have given Texas a pass so far. But as long as the state’s leaders continue to dither, the risk for catastrophe will endure, so let’s take a look at how advocates for people not freezing to death in their homes have been using Facebook ads to pressure Gov. Greg Abbott et al to do something, as well as how pro-fossil fuel and natural gas are using their ads to maintain the status quo.
Among the biggest clean energy groups pressuring the Texas government to reform their electric grid has been Advanced Energy Works, an advocacy group co-founded by Tom Steyer. They’ve spent $46,943 exclusively on six Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Texas in late November and early December, primarily targeting young women in the state. Interestingly, their ads took a line commonly deployed by fossil fuel advocates - “energy independence” - and turned it around to argue that Abbott and his allies want to “take away the rights of Texas families and businesses to control where their energy comes from,” implying that they’re forcing Texans to power their homes with fossil fuels instead of giving them the opportunity to use clean energy.
Of course, another advocate using massive digital ad buys to pressure the Abbott administration is gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke. Since late January, O’Rourke has been running ads connecting campaign contributions from oil execs to last year’s disaster, but more recently he’s been running ads across Facebook and YouTube using the anniversary of the freeze to power a literal fundraising drive across the state: “Almost a year has passed since our energy grid collapsed, leaving millions of families without heat, electricity, and running water for days. To mark the anniversary of this disaster, join me for our Keeping the Lights On statewide drive. We will be uniting with communities across Texas to remember what happened and honor our neighbors who stepped up to serve their communities during the crisis.”
We’ve also seen that groups that have nothing to do with Texas have used the state’s anomalous energy system to advocate for better systems - particularly in Virginia. Power for Tomorrow, a group connected to Dominion Energy, has spent nearly all of its Facebook ad budget - just over $138k - on ads that argue for utility regulation, laud Virginia lawmakers for “working hard to protect reliable access to affordable power,” or in a few cases, attacking Clean Virginia in particular for “spending millions to remove consumer protections against skyrocketing utility bills and blackouts.” On a much smaller scale, a group called Virginians for Clean Energy spent under $200 on a pair of boosted news ads implicitly arguing that clean energy and an integrated energy grid are critical elements to preventing blackouts like last year’s in Texas and elsewhere in the country.
However, there are also plenty of actors who are deeply committed to persuading the public that everything is fine and that no changes are needed. Among these is, of course, Gov. Abbott, whose re-election campaign is laser-focused on motivating the GOP base above all else. Unsurprisingly, he’s run zero (0) Facebook ads related to last year’s storm or its causes, but last week he launched a five-figure ad campaign promoting how much he loves fossil fuels: “Gov. Greg Abbott is running for re-election to secure the future of Texas & PROTECT the Texas oil & gas industry. Gov. Abbott has signed multiple laws to defeat the radical “Green New Deal” & protect thousands of high paying energy jobs here in the Lone Star State.”
Similarly, the Texas Oil and Gas Association has spent nearly $30k in the past three months, mostly on ads that argue that “The Green New Deal would stop all of the progress Texas and the U.S. is making with investments in affordable, reliable energy for a cleaner future.” A few of their video ads over the past couple months, though, do argue that the state’s fossil fuel industry “maintains operations and procedures to keep product flowing in the heat and the cold. Our industry is ready for winter!” We estimate that they’ve spent around $8.5k on these.
Abbott and the TXOGA are also getting digital cover nationwide from PragerU. The right-wing online disinformation outlet promotes a lot of its content through Facebook ads, but we did find that they’ve spent close to $10k on a couple of their videos. One falsely places the blame for last year’s freeze entirely on the burgeoning clean energy industry in Texas, while another similarly places blame on clean energy subsidies while taking advantage of uncertainty among college students to make their case.
Climate, clean energy, and conservation ads in this year’s key states
FL-GOV: Using his Spanish-language boosted news page, Charlie Crist promoted an El Nuevo Herald story highlighting the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s investment in the Everglades: “El dinero procede de la ley de infraestructura que el presidente Joe Biden promulgó en noviembre y representa la mayor inversión en los Everglades de la historia.”
NH-SEN: Maggie Hassan launched another fundraising ad campaign with climate action as a central plank, this time asking for donations with her dog: “If we let Republicans take back the Senate, that means giving up all our hard-earned efforts for reproductive rights, climate change and voting rights.”
NV-SEN: In her second Facebook fundraising ad campaign so far this year, Catherine Cortez Masto again made climate action a priority for her re-election: “Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is a tireless champion for working families, fighting to make health care more affordable, protect voting rights and reproductive freedoms and to combat climate change.”
WI-SEN: In a briefly run fundraising ad from Mandela Barnes, he highlights climate action as one of the key stakes of the race: “Johnson and his far-right mega donors will spend whatever it takes to stop us, because this Senate seat is EVERYTHING. This Senate seat is abolishing the filibuster, it’s voting rights, it’s climate change legislation, it’s health care, it’s money in politics, it’s every issue you care about.”
Reaching Frontline Communities
ProgressNow New Mexico launched a rather clever Valentine’s Day anti-fossil fuels Facebook ad campaign last week. The ads, each of which primarily target either men or women in New Mexico, encourage users to “break up with” or “swipe left and say NOPE to Big Oil,” comparing the industry to an abusive romantic partner. All the ads lead to a similarly themed landing page.
Tracking Climate Disinfo Online
This week, tracking identified approximately 250 tweets with more than 10 retweets and 25 Facebook posts with more than 10 engagements that contained misinformation or toxic narratives related to the environment from January 31, 2022 through February 6, 2022. More than seven million people were exposed to this content on Twitter during the time period reviewed and the content had over 2,500 engagements on Facebook, a decrease from last week's exposure levels.
Almost 100 percent of the people exposed to climate-related misinformation or toxic narratives on Twitter were exposed to one of these themes:
Combating climate change makes America weaker internationally;
Climate change is a hoax;
Climate activists are hypocrites.
These narratives were also the focus of approximately 45 percent of the Facebook engagements captured by our tracking. Triplecheck’s full report can be found here.
Measuring the National Organic Conversation
The top three Facebook posts mentioning climate change and related terms last week came from March for Science (68.1k interactions), ForAmerica (50.7k interactions), and Turning Point USA (32.9k interactions).
It goes without saying that Turning Point USA’s meme took CNN’s story wildly out of context - you can read the article, which was posted in January 2020, here. Additionally, the top two memes were also posted by other meme pages with similar political angles, but to much lower engagement. Overall though, engagement on Facebook posts about climate change and related topics remained low last week, as there seemed to be fewer relevant posts from high-impact pages; for example, there were no posts about climate change or clean energy from either of Joe Biden’s or Kamala Harris’ Facebook pages last week.
The top three Instagram posts mentioning climate change from last week came from National Geographic (396.3k interactions), Leonardo DiCaprio (247.6k interactions), and Leonardo DiCaprio (152.5k interactions). We’ll also note that a rather grisly post from wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen, where he promoted “Don’t Look Up”, got 152.9k interactions, and the above meme from TP USA got 114k interactions on Instagram.
That’s it for Climate Monitor this week. As always, head to climatemonitor.substack.com to see these updates in real time as we publish them throughout the week!
And if you have any comments or questions, feel free to drop us a line by shooting an email to nick@fwiwmedia.com.