Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that these conspiracy theories are not simply the work of a well-known and highly specific brand of “misinformation”. If these attitudes are accepted and internalized, they are sticky. Facts, statistics, and evidence may challenge misinformation, but they do little to change attitudes that have been woven into a person’s core beliefs.

And that’s a problem for the many governments, businesses, and other institutions scrambling to speed up the transition to renewables.

Origins of Anti-Wind Conspiracies

While scientific research on climate change has indicated since at least the 1950s that carbon dioxide emissions could cause severe and, in some cases, relatively imminent environmental change, one of the first major cultural drivers for renewables was perceived as a direct attack on the financial and political power of the fossil fuel industry.

In the Simpsons episode The Simpsons Touch a Classic, the billionaire Mr. Burns erects a tower high into the sky to artificially shade out the sun, leaving Springfield’s citizens no choice but to buy his nuclear power. It’s an absurd plotline that exaggerates the threat of both renewable energy and climate change, but at the time, it was one of many concerns that fossil fuel interests would seek to slow the rollout of renewables.

In 2004, then–Australian Prime Minister John Howard appointed the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group, a collection of fossil fuel industry executives and lobbyists. The group’s express mission was to “slow the take-up of renewable energy” to prolong the dominance of coal, oil, and gas.

Wind farms faced similar public relations challenges. Unlike coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear power plants, which tend to be sited at great distances from homes, schools, and businesses, wind turbines are often sited on ridgelines or open plains, making them highly visible from long distances away. It’s not difficult to see how some began to focus their attention on wind farms.

Dr. Kevin Winter and colleagues from Cardiff University found similar patterns in studies conducted in the U.K. A conspiracy belief in one area was a far stronger predictor of opposition to wind projects than a respondent’s age, gender, educational level, or political affiliation. Other work out of the U.S., Australia, and Germany has identified similarly strong correlations.

As with so many areas of misinformation, once attitudes harden, they are impervious to rebuttal. Empirical evidence that wind turbines do not poison groundwater supplies, stop the rotation of the Earth, or cause blackouts and mass murder rarely changes minds, because opposition to wind farms is not opposition based on misperceptions or misconceptions. It is opposition that is, as Winter et al. describe it, “rooted in people’s worldviews.”

Wind turbines are icons of the 21st-century energy transition. For some, they represent a desirable, necessary, and inevitable path forward: a vision of the future and hope for tackling climate change. For others, wind turbines are a blight on the landscape that is both “ugly” and symbolic of an overreaching government.

In that sense, it’s worth remembering that the debate over wind farms is just the latest installment of a much longer tug of war over energy and identity. After all, coal, oil, and gas have become cultural symbols of an earlier era, one that was associated with economic prosperity and power in large part because it was.

Acknowledging the harm to the planet and, in some cases, human health, caused by fossil fuels, threatens that image of bygone success. So to some extent, Trump, his supporters, and fossil fuel interests more broadly are engaging in a phenomenon that scholars describe as “anti-reflexivity” – a refusal to reflect on the negative consequences of the past.

The frequent refrains and exaggerations that wind farms are bad for the health of birds and people, bad for land values and the property tax base, or that renewables are a foreign, government-controlled plot to take away liberty and power taps directly into this identity politics. New energy sources, to some, are not only a physical threat to their “natural” way of life, but an existential threat to their identity.

Wind turbines are physical structures that produce a measurable amount of carbon-free electricity. But for those who oppose them, they are also political symbols that represent government overreach, cultural weakness, and a broader loss of power and control.

Resistance Is Futile

In countries across the world, wind power is on the rise. Wind farms of the type described above have grown in number from about 1,500 in 2000 to nearly 7,000 by 2018. Investment in offshore wind power has particularly surged in the past five years, as costs continue to fall and countries look for large-scale, reliable, low-carbon power sources.

Despite Trump’s vows to fight back against the “fake news” mainstream media (and what he seems to perceive as a broader global liberal consensus), it’s hard to see these recent rhetoric blasts as doing much more than feeding fearmongering echo chambers online.

Anti-wind conspiracies will continue to thrive as long as their underlying beliefs remain accepted as true by large numbers of people. As the world’s supply of low-cost, carbon-free energy transitions away from fossil fuels and towards wind, solar, and other sources, the noise from both ends of the argument will surely grow.