President Donald Trump attempted to take questions from reporters on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., about a European Union trade deal. As he often does, he first had a few things to say off-script. Among his proclamations were that wind turbines are a “con job,” “drive the whales loco,” “kill all of the birds,” and may even be “dangerous for humans.” As anti-wind noise from the White House goes, it was relatively on-brand but more grandiose than usual. For those focused on renewable energy expansion, such theatrical asides are easy to overlook. But energy analysts say these conspiracy-laden messages about clean energy aren’t just bizarre soundbites. As with Trump, they form part of a long global history of anti-wind conspiracies.

Trump’s complaint that windmills—his word, not mine—are particularly unsafe for humans and wildlife is a perennial refrain, usually invoking similar criticisms about supposed “bird and bat deaths,” and more recently “noise pollution.” Trump often calls the turbines “windmills,” a casual semantic shift that has become shorthand for a host of climate change denial tropes. The fact that one U.S. president is acting like the problem with renewables is that they might make whales go nuts shouldn’t be surprising. Sociologists and psychologists who study these conspiracies have known this for a long time. As far back as the 19th century, technological changes to people’s daily lives—like the telephone—provoked a moral panic over the spread of, say, diseases. At the time, religious institutions were quick to compare telephone wires with medieval depictions of the devil’s web, as if the adoption of this new technology was the work of Satan himself. When it comes to wind turbines, it’s not a leap to wonder if people’s attachment to fossil fuels might be part of the problem.

A fair amount of research into conspiracy theories shows they are more deep-seated than mere errors of fact or a simple unwillingness to accept scientific truths. Once ideas take root in someone’s schema of the world, data alone won’t cause them to update their views. That matters because trying to pivot to clean energy has fallen to governments, businesses, and large organizations, which depend on wide swaths of society to change their ways.

The Emergence and Persistence of Wind Turbine Myths

If, since at least the 1950s, climate science has warned that carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway environmental changes that will arrive faster than might seem possible, for decades, renewables were sold as more of an attempt to undermine the power of fossil fuel corporations. This played out in the popular imagination, with a famous Simpsons episode where cartoon plutocrat Mr. Burns builds a tower so tall it eclipses the sun, requiring residents of Springfield to buy his nuclear power. It was a joke, of course, but not such a big one. In the real world, fossil fuel incumbents have a long history of not exactly rolling out the red carpet for renewables.

In 2004, then–Australian Prime Minister John Howard met with a collection of fossil fuel industry executives and formed the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group. Its purpose, Howard made clear, was to help coal, oil, and gas “slow the growth of renewables.” And, to be fair, the public image of wind farms hasn’t been particularly helpful, either. Unlike oil rigs in the middle of the ocean or coal mines in the middle of nowhere, wind farms tend to sit on ridgelines, the tops of hills, and in open plains. So they’re easy to see, which makes them an obvious target for conspiracy theories. Claims such as wind turbine syndrome, long derided by medical professionals as a “non-disease,” also built up online over time.

The fact that people who oppose wind farms also believe in a range of other conspiracy theories has been confirmed by academic research. A study led by Kevin Winter, a social psychologist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany, found that conspiracy thinking predicted people’s opposition to a wind farm project much more strongly than their age, gender, education level, or political orientation. A 2022 paper with data from the U.S., U.K., and Australia also found that those who held beliefs in a range of different conspiracy theories were also the most opposed to wind turbines. There was a clear tendency among respondents who believed conspiracy theories about climate change (not all of them believed in man-made climate change), government conspiracies to take away individual liberties, energy security conspiracies, and QAnon conspiracies to also find wind turbines “environmentally and socially harmful.”

Opposition to wind farms, in other words, is not correlated with demographics in any meaningful way. It is simply correlated with conspiracy-minded people. Factual pushbacks, in such cases, are not helpful. Data about where wind farms poison groundwater or how they cause mass blackouts simply doesn’t cut through, as it is unlikely to cause people to “update their priors.” To someone predisposed to conspiracy thinking, it’s unlikely to matter if the facts show that they are wrong.

Wind turbines are symbols. As installations, wind farms are large and highly visible. By comparison, fossil fuel plants are frequently invisible, buried underground or very far from any city. That makes wind farms symbolic victories for those who want to embrace renewables: progress, change, action, forward motion, and so on. At the same time, these same structures also symbolize for others: loss of control, centralized state power, government overreach, big business, slow response, a waste of money, and so on.

In essence, beneath arguments about the transition to clean energy are arguments about cultural values. Fossil fuels have been the fuel of an era of abundance and growth, and for some, giving them up seems like an attack on that legacy. For that reason, it is described by some scholars as “anti-reflexivity,” and that sentiment about “past prosperity is currently dominated by a political figure with exceptionally high visibility: Donald Trump.” So while Trump is rarely the first to say anything and will likely not be the last, for some supporters, it’s music to their ears.