Energy consultant a top social media influencer with Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore
A consultant from Navigant has been named one of the globe’s top 20 energy influencers. Kees van der Leun might not be a household name, but the list sees him rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tesla’s Elon Musk, actor Leonardo Di Caprio and even out-ranking former US Vice President Al Gore.
Onalytica is an information technology services firm that offers influencer relationship management and predictive analytics software, and the professional services firm has released a ranking of the world’s most prominent climate figures on social media.
Researchers looked analysed over 230,000 posts from top social media influencers on a range of future of energy subjects – including hot topics such as clean energy, fossil fuels, fracking, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, oil, and green energy, between November 2017 to January 2018.
The top ten was understandably dominated by keystone figures of America’s political and media elite. Democratic Party State Governors Andrew Cuomo, Jay Inslee and Kate Brown hold the peak of the list, followed by Bloomberg CEO Michael Bloomberg, American environmentalist, author, and journalist Bill McKibben. Rounding off the top ten were heavyweights Brad Plumer, climate change reporter for the New York Times, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, director-general of the Directorate-General for Energy within the European Commission Dominique Ristori, David Roberts of Vox, and former Academy Awards nominee Mark Ruffalo.
Surprisingly, however, just outside the top ten, on par with Oscar-winning actor-turned climate campaigner Leonardo Di Caprio, Onalytica ranks Dutch consultant Kees van der Leun as one of the world’s most influential social media presences, regarding climate and energy sciences. Van der Leun has been working in sustainable energy consulting for over three decaddes, for Ecofys, a Netherlands based consultancy.
The Dutchman, who is active online mainly thorugh his Twitter account of some 20,000 followers – @Sustainable2050 – joined Ecofys as its third employee and was involved in the management of Ecofys ever since, even remaining after it was acquired by Navigant in 2016. As a Director at Ecofys he develops strategies for energy infrastructure of the future, both large-scale (North Sea energy system) and bottom-up (zero-emission heating of homes and its implications for energy infrastructure). Van der Leun is a self-described “infovore” and an author of numerous reports, notably including The Energy Report, a thorough global scenario showing how the world could reach 100% percent renewable energy by 2050.
Van der Leun is no stranger to the top table of energy influencers, having previously been named a top-10 energy Tweeter by the Guardian newspaper in the UK, as well as being an ever-present in the top-100 global Sustmeme Climate & Energy impact ranking. Now, though, alongside being listed in his home nation of the Netherlands, as one of the top ‘Sustainable 100’, Van der Leun can also claim a greater social media influence on the subject of climate change than a former Vice President of the United States, as Democratic politician and maker of world-renowned climate change documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, Al Gore, ranks just behind Van der Leun.
