Toward the end of a press conference about a European Union trade deal, former U.S. President Donald Trump broke with tradition and digressed into his usual tirade against renewable energy. The rally-cum-Q&A session descended into the usual cavalcade of remarks and half-truths regarding wind turbines and solar panels.

“It’s a con job. It’s made to drive the whales, actually the right word, to drive the whales loco. It’s made to drive the whales nuts because they think it’s big fish. … It kills birds, we know that. It kills humans. You know that.” In that spirit, Trump also added extra shading to Germany, the U.K., France, and windmills in general.

Trump’s remarks were as entertaining as they were expected. But while they are a harbinger of Trump’s future, perhaps even an effort to reintroduce himself to Republican primary voters as the climate change denier in chief, they are also not new. Similar rhetoric around wind turbines and conspiracies has long been bubbling around the world.

Wind turbines are frequently mischaracterized as “windmills.” The confusion is almost as old as the debate around renewables themselves, and it’s an important one because the term windmills is code among some corners of the climate denial community. The utterance is a codeword that, like the word “trees” to Republicans or “jobs” to conservatives, instantly conjures images of wind turbines under threat by overly ambitious city slickers or government cronies.

Many climate change deniers have a track record of amplifying existing moral panics around clean energy projects. It is reminiscent of the panic that spread when the telephone first became popular in the late 19th century, including concerns that they would spread disease. Sound familiar? Shifts in culture and power, whether through introducing new technology or through government regulation, are a common target for ire.

The anger behind such concerns may be perfectly natural, but research shows that the worry and fear run much deeper than simple misinformation. Ingrained attitudes and beliefs don’t get dislodged by fact-checking or reason. The underlying causes of conspiracy thinking may be just as difficult to move as the symptoms themselves, which is a problem for governments and businesses that need to speed up the transition to clean energy.

Understanding Anti-Wind Sentiment

Climate science has been clear at least since the 1950s that atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions have the potential to warm the planet in profound and relatively immediate ways. But when people first rallied around renewable energy, it was usually framed less as a climate issue and more as an effort to take on Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Gas.

An early popular cultural example of this mindset is a 1990 episode of The Simpsons, in which Springfield plutocrat Mr. Burns builds a tower to block out the sun and then forces everyone in town to buy his nuclear power. The cartoon fable was a satirical exaggeration of the political debate of its time. But at the time, the anti-renewables sentiment was a real concern—coal, oil, and gas companies with decades of experience and deep-pocketed lobbyists and investors would work to slow the pace of change.

This is one of several reasons why renewable energy, especially wind power, has long been the subject of conspiracies and opposition. In Australia, the then–prime minister John Howard appointed a group of fossil fuel executives to the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group (let’s call it what it was) in 2004. While it is named as a pro-climate initiative, in reality, its purpose was to “identify obstacles to technology uptake (for instance, the rapid growth of wind farms) and try to address them,” including protecting the primacy of coal, oil, and gas.

Attitudes toward wind farms were another hurdle. While oil fields, coal mines, and nuclear power stations are frequently located far from population centers, wind farms are often highly visible on the horizon, especially if they are built on ridgelines or open plains. Wind turbines also appear to be an irresistible target for conspiracy theorists. As soon as early accounts of “wind turbine syndrome,” which the American Medical Association called a “non-disease” that was simply a headache or similar ailment, hit the airwaves, they circulated for years.

Academic studies bear this out as well. Conspiracy thinking has emerged as the strongest predictor of opposition to wind farms, with one paper published in Germany in 2020 finding that other factors, including age, gender, level of education, political party membership, and even prior knowledge of scientific literature, were less likely to predict whether someone was in favor of or against a project than whether they were predisposed to conspiracy thinking. Since then, surveys of the U.S., U.K., and Australian populations have reached similar conclusions, finding that people who believed in various other conspiracy theories about climate change, government control, or energy security were also more likely to believe in purported wind turbine health effects.