In a press conference this week meant to be about a trade deal between the United States and the European Union, former President Donald Trump decided to spend time again decrying renewable energy. Claiming wind turbines are “basically a con job” that make whales “loco” and “kill everything in sight,” Trump turned another press conference into a spectacle while making some assertions about wind power that are backed by no evidence.

Trump’s interview was, to be fair, a press conference about a trade deal. And as such, most of the coverage has rightly focused on those other topics, not the former president’s colorful conspiracy theories. But wind power and, more broadly, clean energy technologies have become targets for misinformation in the same way as climate change itself or vaccines. And that should worry governments, businesses, and other institutions trying to move quickly to net-zero emissions by 2050 or sooner.

For Trump and some others, wind turbines are “windmills.” The term, which has no technical difference from “wind turbine,” has become something of a code word among people pushing climate change denial. Trump’s claim that “these windmills” send out “noise waves,” which are “killing all these birds,” is a new version of an old canard about wind power and other renewables.

Anti-renewables conspiracies are not new, nor are they unique to the U.S. A famous parallel was the panic about whether telephones could spread disease, a moral panic of the late 19th century. In the U.S. and other countries at the time, it was real technological change that was inspiring fear rather than a particular power source. Today’s arguments about wind power and other clean energy are analogous to those over telephones. In both cases, change inspires both excitement and a sense of foreboding, especially among those who feel the new technology will harm them.

Trump has a long history of using similar language to rail against wind turbines, and he is by no means the only politician who has deployed the same tropes. Trump claims wind turbines drive whales “loco,” but The Economist has noted that his statement that wind turbines “cause cancer, destroy people’s quality of life, and they’re killing the Eagles” has been around almost as long as his presidency, if not longer.

But why should statements like Trump’s persist for so long in the face of mountains of evidence that they are, in fact, baseless? As someone who studies opposition to wind power, my research has shown that these sorts of fears about renewable energy are far more systemic than many people realize.

As far back as the 1950s, climate scientists were warning that carbon dioxide emissions were a “greenhouse” gas that could create dangerous and relatively imminent climate change. But many of the early arguments for renewables focused on the fact that fossil fuel companies had significant political and economic power. One good example of this trope came from a popular culture stalwart, The Simpsons. In a memorable episode, energy tycoon Mr. Burns has a plan to cover the sun with a huge tower to force residents to purchase his nuclear power.

The importance of this cannot be overstated: for people who believe in these arguments, simply presenting evidence is unlikely to change their minds. Demonstrating that there is no evidence wind farms poison groundwater or cause blackouts for hundreds of thousands of people is of no use if the reason they are opposed to them in the first place is based on their worldview and not a misunderstanding.

Wind farms are visible and, at scale, dramatic. For some, they are symbols of a more progressive world, a new era of prosperity powered by technology and free from the consequences of the old world. For others, wind turbines are not simply an aesthetic imposition on the landscape. They also represent the loss of control, of fossil fuels being displaced by something cleaner and more resilient.

A Cultural Shift in Energy Sources

The anger often expressed about wind farms by people like Trump is, to some degree, a surrogate for an existential anger at change. The fossil fuel era, in many ways, funded a century of prosperity. Reflecting on or even acknowledging that oil, coal, and gas have large environmental costs, either at a personal or cultural level, is something that many scholars have described as “anti-reflexivity.”

At its root, Trump’s rhetoric is often nostalgic, harking back to a time when coal, oil, and gas ruled the roost. For people like Trump, or the voters who believed him at the ballot box in 2020, energy security is something tied to fossil fuels more than wind or solar. And that in itself makes cultural and political sense. Energy has, for many, been an “inner-outer” issue, where the energy sources of the home or community are an extension of their identity. Add to that the fact that for some online groups, such as the “manosphere,” climate change is something emasculating or otherwise for the weak, and you get a sense of how complex the politics of renewables are.

For a certain generation of baby boomers and some members of Generation X—white heterosexual men in particular—the cultural shift in energy sources can be both disorienting and perhaps even threatening in a world where their power once felt absolute. Opposition to renewables, and to wind energy in particular, is not just about technology or change. It is also about culture and identity.

In that context, Trump’s colorful barbs about “windmills” attacking whales, crows, and the environment are not just about wind power, although they are clearly intended to have that effect. By himself, he may not shift public opinion on renewable energy, but there are enough millions of people who listen to Trump or who share his view of wind turbines as “windmills” that it should worry businesses and government. Anti-wind conspiracies will not go away because they have roots that are far deeper than a handful of online trolls or provocateurs.