Former U.S. President Donald Trump has a particular affinity for getting distracted. This week, he was supposed to be hosting a press conference on a European Union trade deal, but ended up railing against renewable energy instead. Calling wind turbines a “con job,” the outgoing president claimed they make whales “loco,” kill birds, and cause “some people’s cancer…you know, the little boom that goes on and on.”

On their own, such comments are mere sound bites, examples of Trump’s showboating at its most garish and surreal. They also, however, represent something far more pernicious: a strand of resistance to renewable energy, particularly wind power, that has been growing across the world for decades.

The former president’s choice of words is also significant. He often refers to wind turbines as “windmills.” The term, which has come to serve as something of a stand-in for “climate denier” in mainstream media, points to a cultural subtext of older moral panics over supposedly hazardous technology. As one professor of medicine has written, the “telephone was first heralded by some moral entrepreneurs as spreading diseases” in the 19th century. Yet wind turbines are the subject of “anti-reflexivity” over their purported ill effects.

Academic research on the topic suggests such beliefs are far more deeply held than a contrarian tweet or two might indicate. Once an individual has accepted a false claim and woven it into their personal worldview, attempts to fact-check that belief are unlikely to dislodge it. The problem, then, for governments, businesses, and institutions, is that the time for facts is long past; those seeking a just transition to clean energy need to look at the roots and rise of renewable conspiracies and find ways to address them now.

Misunderstandings About Renewables Run Deep

While warnings about the dangers of rising carbon dioxide emissions date to at least the 1950s, the initial case for investing in renewable energy was made as much as an economic or political one: wind and solar could break the fossil fuel giants’ hold on power. As The Simpsons made clear in an episode from 1990, there were cultural anxieties that fossil fuel interests, too powerful to be constrained, would go to any lengths to protect their place at the top.

The case of the late Australian politician John Howard illustrates this point. In 2004, a year before he left office, he brought together many fossil fuel executives with the remit to advise the government on low emissions technology. The Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group was supposed to be a driver of change, a way of encouraging swift decarbonization. In fact, it had the opposite goal: slow growth in renewables.

The public-facing challenges of renewable energy adoption have also run deep. Wind turbines, the most visible of the lot, were the subject of “anti-reflexivity” over their purported ill effects.

Coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear power plants can be constructed in remote locations, out of public view. Wind farms, by contrast, are often built on prominent ridgelines or open plains, where the turbines are highly visible. Their scale and conspicuousness have made them all too easy targets for criticism and conspiracy theories. Over the years, claims about “wind turbine syndrome”—a so-called “non-disease” rejected by medical experts—gained widespread circulation.

Academic research has pointed to similar conclusions. A German study, led by Kevin Winter, found that “conspiracy beliefs were one of the strongest and most significant predictors of people’s attitudes against a wind farm project.” Factors like age, gender, education, or political affiliation were not nearly as significant as simply holding anti-wind beliefs. In a more recent and much broader series of surveys in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, Winter and other academics found a similar result. Conspiracy-minded people—across the ideological spectrum, and believing in conspiracy theories about climate change denial, federal energy policy, or energy security—were far more likely to believe wind farms were a bad idea.

The crux of the problem is simple: opposition to wind is not the product of fact-checking. For an individual who believes wind farms poison groundwater, cause cancer, or even fly in low Earth orbit, there is little you can do with science to change that. Such resistance, Winter and his co-authors found, is “rooted in people’s worldviews, rather than reflecting misunderstandings.” Facts are a poor remedy for ideological enmity.

Symbolic Battlegrounds

Wind farms are a convenient symbol for this culture war. On one side, they are visible and potent symbols of progress, of innovation, of climate action, of government commitment, of a hopeful future. For the other, wind turbines represent loss of control, government overreach, personal restriction, risk to the planet, and (to some) the risks to safety or health, or unwanted change.

Beneath the more surface concerns are, perhaps, more powerful but less visible forces at play. For those whose families or communities were built on fossil fuels, a willingness to countenance the collateral damage they cause to people and the environment is, in a way, to feel culpable for one’s own good fortune. In the language of some researchers who study it, it is an “anti-reflexivity” over past harms done.