At a press conference last month on a European Union trade deal, former U.S. President Donald Trump was briefly distracted from the day’s agenda by a topic he is well acquainted with: renewable energy. “They are a con job,” he said of wind turbines. “They are driving the whales loco. They’re driving the birds to kill themselves.” Wind power can also, Trump claimed, kill people. The spectacle of a former president making these allegations while surrounded by mic-flogging journalists, aides, and security agents is a familiar one. But it is far from unique. Trump is part of a global surge in conspiracy thinking about renewables that has been developing for the past two decades.

Renewable energy—most of all wind power—has been the target of many bizarre conspiracy theories around the world in recent years. Such claims are often dismissed as the ravings of cranks, an inevitable byproduct of a major technological upheaval. A closer look at these arguments reveals an ideological backlash that goes deeper than any single issue.

Trump’s rhetoric is, in many ways, a window into this larger, worldwide cultural conflict around wind power. He regularly dubs turbines “windmills,” and this slight semantic shift has found a place in climate deniers’ lexicon in recent years. But this isn’t the first time such a moral panic has taken place. When the telephone was first invented, some worried that telegraph wires could transmit syphilis and insanity. In both the wind conspiracy theories and the belief that telephones spread disease, we see how both technology and technological shifts can be sources of existential fear. This is particularly true when those technologies threaten ways of life or challenge established structures of authority.

Studies on climate change denial have suggested that such fears are often much more deeply rooted than simply a lack of information or understanding. Values and beliefs, once they are woven into a person’s worldview, are difficult to shift, even when they are challenged by facts. This is a major obstacle for governments, businesses, and institutions seeking to transition to clean energy.

Wind Turbine Conspiracy Theories in Context

Scientists have been warning since at least the 1950s that emissions of carbon dioxide could lead to deep and rapid environmental transformation. But from the earliest days of the renewables push, it was also framed as a political movement to break up the fossil fuel companies’ stranglehold on power. In The Simpsons, the local tycoon Mr. Burns has found a way to stop the sun from shining on Springfield by building a tower to block it out. This forces the citizens to buy his nuclear power at hugely inflated prices. It was a joke, but also a reflection of real fears at the time that the entrenched fossil fuel industry would work to block clean energy in every way possible.

There is evidence, in fact, that these fears were not misplaced. In 2004, Australian Prime Minister John Howard convened a group of fossil fuel executives to lead the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group. The group was tasked with a perverse mission to slow the uptake of renewables rather than to push for rapid decarbonization in order to protect coal, oil, and gas’s central role in the Australian economy.

Resistance to renewables in the public sphere had been mounting, too. Wind turbines are often highly visible and placed on ridgelines or plains to catch more wind. Oil, coal, and nuclear power plants tend to be out of sight. This, combined with the fears that renewables would be less reliable than fossil fuels or that transmission lines would be ugly, made them a frequent target of disinformation.

Misleading arguments have ranged from “wind turbine syndrome,” which claims that wind farms make people sick, to fears that turbines will taint groundwater and even cause mass blackouts. Such conspiracies have been “debunked” repeatedly by journalists and scientists, but still managed to attract adherents.

Scholars have also identified this trend. A 2013 German study led by Kevin Winter found that conspiracy thinking was a far better predictor of an individual’s opposition to wind farms than age, sex, education level, or political orientation. More recent research in the U.S., U.K., and Australia has found similar trends, with those people who were more likely to buy into conspiracy theories about, for example, the Trump-Biden election outcome being far more likely to consider wind turbines as harmful.

These people, Winter and his co-authors argue, are unresponsive to the same type of factual rebuttals that other opponents of wind energy might respond to. Evidence that wind farms do not poison groundwater, for example, is unlikely to make an impact because their opposition to wind farms “is rooted in people’s worldviews.”

Wind farms have been a site of cultural contestation. For people supporting them, they are a source of progress, modernity, and climate action. To those who oppose them, wind farms represent government control, imposition, and loss of agency.

Conspiracy theories about wind power are not just about the technology. Underneath them lies a rejection of the very idea of a different way of life. As Winter’s group put it, for those who buy into such conspiracy theories, renewables are “a symbol of perceived undesirable changes in society.”