Online reactions to the IEA’s bombshell roadmap to a net-zero 2050
Crickets from right-wing outlets, cicadas from climate groups
On Tuesday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency released a roadmap to net-zero emissions worldwide by 2050 that, for the first time, called for no new fossil fuel extraction projects. We looked at the top 100 Facebook posts about the report and found that plenty of media outlets big and small picked up the story, Democratic lawmakers and pro-climate action groups lauded the report, while only a handful of right-wing pages commented at all.
We should note that while high-profile politicians, news outlets, and conservation and energy groups picked up on the story - including NPR, Al Gore, Sen. Chuck Schumer, and the Sierra Club - this level of engagement is very low.
We suspect that the low engagement can be attributable to one of two things: 1) while significant, a somewhat wonky understanding of the situation is required to appreciate the development, and 2) it affirms what climate-minded groups and individuals have known for years, so we’re not surprised that there wasn’t a strong reaction online.
Al Gore actually expressed the latter sentiment in his Facebook post about the report, which was the second-most engaged post about it after NPR’s.
Media outlets who picked up the story seemed to have mostly played it straight and treated the report like a press release, but more climate-oriented pages like 350.org, Truthout, and others distilled the report into a familiar message: “keep it in the ground.”
Like we mentioned, only a handful of anti-climate action pages even bothered to remark on the report. Those that did, though, tried to undermine the IEA’s findings or, as Fox Business did, spin their report into something else entirely.
On Instagram, many of the most successful English-language posts about the IEA report (of which there were fewer than 100, according to Crowdtangle) actually came from Australian accounts, including the satirical Betoota Advocate and the Guardian Australia, both of which were critical of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s fossil fuel developments in the face of the report.
Meanwhile, top IG posts about the report came from CNN Climate, Greenpeace USA, and Fox Business.