US President Donald Trump’s latest public appearance was supposed to be a press conference to sign a trade deal with the European Union. But as is his way, Trump strayed from the topic and spent a few minutes inveighing against renewable energy.

In his characteristic way, Trump called wind turbines “windmills” and described them as a “con job” that drives whales “loco,” kills birds, and even causes human fatalities. As with his other more notorious statements, wind energy skeptics are likely to recognize the claim as one of Trump’s more theatrical soundbites.

But the apparent randomness of these comments should be recognized for what it is. To people who study and monitor these claims, there is nothing new under the sun. Trump’s tirade against wind turbines echoes a long-running history of global conspiracy theories and myths about renewable energy.

Climate change itself can be experienced and interpreted in many ways. Wind farms in particular have inspired moral panics and have been compared with objects that authorities once demonized, such as telephones. In the 19th century, telephone opponents argued that they caused contagious diseases such as influenza, rabies, and smallpox. Similarly, Trump is now leveraging established power structures to argue that these new machines—wind turbines—are a new threat to human beings, and to our way of life.

While these myths about renewable energy are often easy to poke holes in, the fears driving them are less easy to quell. The patterns in Trump’s comments, as well as the deeper and more recent research on anti-wind sentiment, point to anxieties that run much deeper than uninformed skepticism. Once such myths are integrated into a person’s way of seeing the world, fact-checking and rational explanations are unlikely to change minds. This has serious implications for the speed at which government, industry, and institutions can push the energy transition forward.

Origins of anti-wind conspiracy thinking

Popular narratives like “wind turbine syndrome,” a “non-disease” according to medical professionals, circulated for years.

Academic research has found similar evidence that demographics are a poor indicator of views on wind projects. A study conducted by Kevin Winter and his team in Germany found that there was a strong correlation between attitudes toward conspiracy theories and attitudes about wind energy. Conspiracy thinking was a better predictor of opposition to wind projects than a person’s age, gender, education level, or political leanings. Similar results emerged from more recent polls conducted in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

Opposition to wind farms based on conspiracy theories is nearly impossible to counter with facts, as by definition, the belief is more about one’s identity and one’s general sense of who can be trusted. People who believe that wind turbines are poisoning groundwater or causing mass blackouts will continue to do so even when presented with evidence to the contrary.

Wind projects, then, are a highly visible symbol of the clean energy transition. As such, wind farms are on the one hand viewed as vehicles for a greener, more innovative, and secure future. For others, they represent a loss of control, government overreach, and disruption of the status quo.

Wind turbine opposition is one example of a much broader cultural shift. The fossil fuel industries have powered a century of growth, and for some, confronting their environmental impact is seen as an attack on a bygone era of prosperity. This is what some scholars have termed “anti-reflexivity,” a rejection of any critical reflection on past harmful practices and attitudes.

But for all of the theatrics, the underlying truth is more complex. Attacks on renewable energy are rarely just about wind turbines. They are about control, cultural identity, and the wider reckoning with a rapidly changing world.