President Donald Trump was holding a press conference on a European Union trade deal, but strayed into his favorite subject area: renewable energy. He called wind turbines a “con job” and said they drive whales “loco,” kill birds, and kill people. At first glance, such comments are best understood as the statements of a showman, an entertainer who loves to shock and punch up on Twitter. But in fact, they are part of a much longer and global trend in which conspiracy theories against renewable energy have been propagated with wind farms as their principal target.

Trump regularly calls turbines “windmills,” which has become shorthand among deniers and skeptics for “clean energy project I don’t like.” He was also channeling an earlier moral panic against technological change, which has been remarked on several times: in the 19th century, there was a widespread belief that telephones would make people sick by spreading contagious diseases via their wires.

Social science research suggests that people’s concerns go deeper than a simple lack of understanding about renewable energy. Worldviews, once adopted, are extremely hard to change—even in the face of compelling evidence and expert rebuttal. For that reason, President Trump’s comments on wind turbines may seem innocuous on their own, but they represent a greater problem for the state, industry, and academia, which are struggling to speed up the energy transition.

The Origins and Persistence of Wind Conspiracy Theories

While scientific consensus on climate change has been clear since at least the 1950s, that warming was caused by carbon dioxide emissions and would cause profound and relatively imminent change to our planet’s environment, the early renewables debate was often focused on the need to take power from fossil fuel companies. A famous example is the animated series The Simpsons, in which business magnate Mr. Burns builds a tower that blocks out the sun and forces everyone in Springfield to buy his nuclear power.

The cartoon fantasy was, of course, a satirical exaggeration, but it highlighted a genuine fear of the time that fossil fuel companies would do whatever they could to impede renewable adoption.

In some respects, that was proven true. In 2004, then–then-Australian Prime Minister John Howard created a group of fossil fuel executives to represent his Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group. The goal was not to create as many low-emissions technologies as possible, but to help coal, oil, and gas maintain their dominance by slowing down the growth of renewable energy in Australia.

Wind turbines have also been an easy target for conspiracy theorists and everyday critics. While coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear power plants are often hidden from view or have been outsourced to developing countries, wind turbines are visible from miles around. They are frequently built on ridgelines, open plains, or other visually prominent areas, and their towering height makes them conspicuous. They have been the subject of myths such as “wind turbine syndrome” or “electromagnetic sensitivity,” which medical researchers have identified as a “non-disease.”

Wind farm opposition also stems from a worldview. In a German study, Kevin Winter and his colleagues found that demographics were much less powerful at predicting opposition to wind farms than was belief in conspiracy theories. Wind projects were more likely to be opposed by people who accepted other climate change or government conspiracy theories, even when age, gender, education, and political party were held constant.

In more recent research, our team found that those patterns held for other countries as well, including the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Even when we controlled for demographics, education, and party identification, people who were predisposed to believe in conspiracies—whether they were about climate change, government control, or energy security—were more likely to see wind turbines as dangerous or otherwise negative.

When people accept a particular worldview, evidence can’t dislodge their convictions. Someone who believes wind turbines poison groundwater or cause regional blackouts is not going to change their mind by being shown that there is no evidence for these claims. Instead, such opposition is “rooted in people’s worldviews” rather than just a gap in their knowledge.

Wind farms are not simply a source of electricity. For some people, they are a symbol of progress, of innovation, and of climate action. But for others, they represent the opposite: government overreach, a lack of control, and unwanted change.