The former president was giving a press conference in praise of a European Union trade deal, but predictably, his speech quickly turned to the subject of wind turbines. In his words, they are “a con job,” an “aesthetic disgrace,” and a hazard to whales, which they drive “loco,” and to birds, which they kill. Not to mention the humans who live near wind farms. “You know what they do to you, and a lot of people are learning about it,” Trump told the reporters. “In a town next to the windmills, they’re getting sick.”

On one level, such statements are the usual clip-job fodder from a former president who makes a show of pulling a spray tan right before the cameras start rolling. But Trump is not making this stuff up, and the conspiracy theories he’s peddling are not unique to the United States or to Trump himself. We’ve seen them before, in different forms, around the world.

Trump’s tendency to conflate wind turbines with windmills is so common among climate deniers that it has its own viral meme. This nostalgia for windmills in particular harks back to an earlier moral panic: in the 1800s, some people were convinced that telephones spread cancer, syphilis, and malaria. In retrospect, both the telephone scare and the wind turbine conspiracy theories tell us more about the people who believe them than they do about the actual technology.

These fears are even deeper and more difficult to overcome than previously thought. A series of new studies on the psychology of anti-wind conspiracies, published in recent months, suggests that this opposition is far more entrenched than previously recognized—and harder to overcome than a fact-checking video or a sober expert assessment. This has big implications for governments, companies, and institutions that are under pressure to accelerate the shift to clean energy.

The Anti-Wind Conspiracy Origins and Acceleration

The irony is that climate science has been warning us about the dangers of CO2 emissions since at least the 1950s—and even back then, the modelers predicted a fairly imminent and total transformation. But in the early days of the renewables push, the message was not about preventing climate change, but rather about breaking the monopoly of fossil fuel companies.

The Simpsons put this in satirical terms when the energy tycoon Mr. Burns tries to block out the sun with a massive tower to force Springfield residents to buy his nuclear power. The cartoon premise was an exaggeration, of course, but the underlying logic was that fossil fuel interests would fight renewables tooth and nail to preserve their stranglehold.

In fact, those fears were not unfounded: in 2004, Australian Prime Minister John Howard appointed a group of fossil fuel executives to what was called the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group. But rather than advocate rapid decarbonization, this so-called “greenhouse mafia” worked to slow down renewables to preserve coal, oil, and gas.

As public acceptance of wind farms came under attack, developers found that community resistance and NIMBYism were also on the rise. Wind power opponents latched onto the supposed health impacts of turbines (the so-called “wind turbine syndrome,” a “non-disease” according to medical experts) and the idea that they would kill birds. They gained significant political traction, while scientific rebuttals failed to change the minds of the already converted.

A pair of academic studies suggests that anti-wind objections have less to do with socio-demographics and more to do with worldviews. In a 2018 study led by Kevin Winter, a team of researchers asked Germans about their attitudes to wind projects in their backyard. Conspiracy thinking, they found, was a “much stronger predictor of intention to object” to local wind turbines than age, gender, education, or political identity.

Newer surveys, conducted across the U.S., U.K., and Australia, reached similar conclusions. Researchers found that conspiracy-prone respondents—those who tend to believe government-mandated conspiracy theories like those about COVID-19 or anti-vaxx propaganda—were also more likely to endorse conspiracy theories about wind turbines and renewables in general, such as “we’re transitioning to green energy only to become energy insecure.” They also found that people were more likely to buy the climate change “debunkers” if they “felt a low sense of self-control in their lives.” Similar patterns have emerged for concerns over wind turbine health impacts.

As Winter and his colleagues put it in their report, the opposition is “rooted in people’s worldviews” rather than simple misconceptions or lack of information.

Wind turbines are also highly visible, and often purposely built on ridgelines or open plains. By contrast, oil fields, coal mines, and nuclear power plants tend to be more remote and less visible to the public eye.

Wind farms, in other words, are easy targets for attack. So easy, in fact, that all manner of QAnon-style claims about wind turbine cancer clusters, as well as more low-tech fake news stories, have taken hold on the fringes of the internet.

But the research also indicates that this conflict is more than an argument about aesthetics or land use, however polarizing they may seem. At its heart is a more existential clash between two competing visions for society—and the identity politics of fossil fuels vs. renewables.