Which fossil fuel coalition group is advertising to you this election season?
I too can use Canva
Earlier this year I published a story in The Guardian about a specific gas industry coalition group advertising effort called Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future. By coalition group, I don't mean well-labeled official trade associations, but an organization where the name and mission sounds fairly unimpeachable but it's not immediately clear who supports or funds it.
Here's the cliff notes:
What I found was a public relations and influence campaign with a $10 million two-year budget funded by major pipeline companies and other gas industry players. Internal documents obtained through public records requests by the Energy & Policy Institute showed the group is particularly interested in messaging to young, Black and Latino Americans — especially ones who are concerned about climate change.
What's more, they have spent significant money in media markets like Albany and Harrisburg — as New York and Pennsylvania consider both specific pipeline projects and wider climate policies.
A key part of this story was understanding at whom and where these ads were being directed. Strategy documents from the group indicated what the campaign hoped to accomplish, but knowing what states and demographic groups were actually seeing the ads provided third-party proof.
While these ads showed up in other social media platforms (and TV) Meta's ad library is relatively easy to access for answering questions like this. But the user-friendly version of library didn't offer an straightforward way to answer my core question. In what locations was the group advertising to the most?
To answer that question, I realized I would have to one of two things
Manually input data from every individual ad into a spreadsheet and calculate the percentages through multiple stages of math problems. At the time there were about 900 ads, each with about 20 data points.
Use the ad library's API (a public-ish facing version of a database that can be queried) to request that information and then add it up automatically through custom code.
Obviously option 2 was faster and less likely to end with me missing a decimal after being up for all hours manually inputting data. The problem with option 2 is that while I know what kinds of problems can be solved via coding, and generally how you might go about doing it, I don't have to skills to write that level of code myself.
Fortunately, this story began percolating during my fellowship at Brown University, where I met student researchers at the Climate Development Lab.
They put me in touch with Bradford Roarr, part of the university's Center for Computation and Visualization, who very generously listened to me explain my problem, spun up a relatively short code snippet in Python and walked me through what each section did so I could modify it to answer future questions. All for what amounted to paragraph in the final story.
But it turns out that code snippet is having a second life.
Earlier this month, Energy & Policy Institute (the same utility-focused watchdog that placed some of the public records requests of the documents that ended up in my Guardian story) published their own tracker of "front-group" advertising across the ad library. While they used the code developed for my story, I didn't know they were expanding the concept into a fully-fledged tracker until I saw it in a news story.( And for what its worth, EPI doesn't list their own funders on their website.)
I realized I could return to the code snippet still on my computer to analyze where this year's election season ad spending is happening for both older and new fossil-fuel industry-backed groups.
Here's what I found:
Consumer Energy Alliance, an advocacy and lobbying group backed by large manufacturers, trade associations and utility companies, has been active in state energy debates for almost a decade.
CEA has focused its advertising this year on higher gas prices, pushing for further oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, continuing to use the Line 5 pipeline in Michigan, and more.
Michigan is where CEA has advertised the most in 2022, likely related to the focus on Line 5. Texas, Virginia and Pennsylvania are also heavily represented, including a set of Spanish-language ads that are primarily focused on Texas.
The Empowerment Alliance, which I like to think of as CEA's more aggro cousin, has offered a non-stop feed of "BLAME JOE BIDEN FOR GAS PRICES" advertisements on social media this year, including MAGA friendly imagery and the fiery flames of hell next to gas prices.
(Reminder: automobile fuel is highly flammable, do not put flames of hell next to your gas station).
TEA is focused, however. While many advertisers show their ads to at least some minor amount of audience in each U.S. state, TEA is only advertising in 12 states in 2022, with the highest number of impressions in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Pipeline-backed Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future continues to advertise in DC, New York state and Virginia but has shifted into some areas I didn't see earlier this year, including lots of impressions in Louisiana, Massachusetts, Florida and Washington state in October alone.
There's also the brand-new Partnership to Address Global Emissions Coalition, started by the EQT Corporation, which owns the controlling interest in the highly-contested Mountain Valley Pipeline, as well as Natural Allies members and pipeline companies Williams and TC Energy. There advertisements are fairly similar in content to Natural Allies, with a little more attention to LNG policies.
While this group has only been advertising for a few weeks, it has been particularly focused in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia.
The location of these ads matter because of the changing nature of these influence campaigns: a focus on states and state politics.
If you're an liquid natural gas exporter or gas pipeline company interested in encouraging more LNG export from the US and improve general public opinion about your business, it might sound good to advertise across the whole country.
But if your business' profitability relies on a few key projects being approved by state permits and friendly legislators, you might want to put extra effort into state lobbying and improving public opinion in that state.
That's largely what I found with Natural Allies — with a heavy side of DC-based media advertising. In 2021 and early 2022, they were focused heavily in states where their members had expansion projects in the works (including the very live question of the Regional Energy Access pipeline in New Jersey and Pennsylvania) or where state policies threatened their overall business.
Where these groups are spending now indicates where their business needs key support — including places where policy is slowly turning against and where state legislative elections could make the difference this November.
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