The signs were in place well in advance: American fossil fuel enthusiasts nervously chewed their fingers down to the nubs, waiting to see if the former President would take the bait. After all, it was the “big announcement” about the European Union trade deal, a press conference intended to showcase an important achievement and hopefully reset his fortunes. Instead, he talked about wind turbines: “This is a con job, OK? I call it a con job,” he said. “The turbines are driving the whales loco,” he continued, “killing the birds, killing people.”

Trump’s comments were hardly new. He has frequently recycled similar phrases, often using the older term “windmills” for turbines. Despite the melodrama of the moment, these words are more than empty campaign trail rhetoric; they are the most recent manifestation of a global resistance to renewable energy development and a stubborn refusal to believe in its potential. The scope of that pushback is vast, and it starts not with Trump, not with a single worldview, but with a long history of conspiracy theories and fears about the technologies on which renewable energy depends.

The Targets of Conspiracy Theories

The central role of conspiracies and anxieties in fossil fuel culture is not a novel idea. Conspiracy theories about wind energy date back as far as wind turbines themselves, from pre-industrial era canards about windmills to the “wind turbine syndrome” scare a few decades ago. At each stage, what opponents of turbines fear is a loss of power: financial, cultural, and geopolitical.

They are not alone in worrying about those changes. Fear of change has long underpinned changes in public communication and scientific research, according to extensive historical analyses. For instance, in the early days of the telephone, a group of moral entrepreneurs warned of “telephone spine,” a disease that was ostensibly spread by the telegraph wires that then crisscrossed cities. Although this panic was obviously overblown, it was also an important precursor to anti-wind movements. In both cases, conspiracy theories and canards spread alongside—and, in some cases, as a result of—large-scale shifts in power, energy, and communications that forced people to reconsider their fundamental ideas about how the world was organized.

The effects are long-lived: in one study conducted on German attitudes towards wind power, conspiracy thinking was a much stronger predictor of support or opposition to wind farms than any other factor, including age, gender, education, and political party identification. Other research, conducted across the U.S., U.K., and Australia, similarly found tthat hose predisposed to conspiracy thinking were less supportive of wind energy. All of which supports a key insight of experts in the field: in cases where a person’s worldview is shaped by conspiracy thinking or fear of renewable energy, it is almost impossible to move them with facts.

In many ways, it is easy to see why that is. Wind farms are loud, unavoidable, highly visible pieces of infrastructure. Unlike coal mines, offshore oil rigs, and nuclear reactors, wind turbines don’t always take place “behind the curtain” but instead sit directly on the ridgelines and in the plains where people hunt and fish and drive their cars. The spread of those farms and the changes that come with them have often been accompanied by seemingly mystical language: turbines and utility poles plunge into the ground to tap an invisible source of power, allowing electricity to flow invisibly from farm to house.

Wind farms are also often, by necessity, large. Wind turbines sit atop steel towers that are far taller than an average person and capable of generating enormous amounts of energy. For many people who resist them, that scale is important. Wind farms make an easy, tangible target for people who want to express broader fears about government control and shifting energy paradigms. To supporters of renewable energy, they are investments in the future, bold markers of progress and climate action; to the opponents, they represent unwelcome change.

The Culture War around Wind Farms

Underlying some of the conflicts around wind farms and the like is a decades-old cultural shift. As scholars who have tracked the rise of anti-reflexivity have pointed out, fossil fuel combustion and use have for centuries been the literal driving force behind human development and, in particular, the prosperity of the 20th century. An entire civilization, they note, has been built around combustion and carbon dioxide. For many of those who built it, however, it is all too easy to simply look the other way when it comes to those fuels’ negative impacts.

One solution is to demonize and attack renewable energy: call it socialism, mark its technologies as suspect, and resist its installation. Trump’s rhetoric about wind turbines is a prime example: while he occasionally dresses it up as concern about geopolitics and energy independence, he also invokes a range of other fears, about government power, energy bills, and the environment, even while offering no evidence for his claims. His approach, in other words, is designed not to persuade by facts but to tap into pre-existing anxieties and confirm them.

Fossil fuel culture has also been shaped by broader trends in identity politics. Climate change and the clean energy transition, especially, have been criticized as an attack on masculinity, for instance in corners of the “manosphere.” For the baby boomers, for white, heterosexual men especially, the changes in the 21st century have often been experienced as a disorienting and accelerating threat to an established order where their control once felt like a given. The growth of renewable energy, in this telling, is a central part of that culture war.