- calendar_today August 17, 2025
On Wednesday, former U.S. president Donald Trump held a press conference that was supposed to focus on a European Union trade deal, but as usual for the former president, the occasion instead became an opportunity for him to attack wind turbines. “Windmills kill all the birds. These things are a con job,” Trump said. “Whales go crazy. They go loco.”
Such allegations are an oddly theatrical way to make a case against renewables, but despite the more theatrical elements of the clip, it’s by no means the first time Trump has made statements about wind energy. Moreover, Trump is far from the only one to make such claims, or to cast doubt on the safety or necessity of wind turbines in general.
The term “windmill” itself has become something of a shibboleth for the climate denial community. In many ways, Trump’s musings about turbines driving whales “loco” resemble an earlier panic: that telephones would spread diseases.
Dig a little deeper, and it becomes clear that both examples reflect a similar sense of technological change and lost control, whether by vulnerable communities living on the front lines of climate change or simply people who want to maintain their accustomed ways of life.
But further still, a body of research suggests that the anxieties fueling such worldviews may run deeper than a single issue or target, and that once they take hold, they are unlikely to be swayed by facts or reason. If that’s the case, there’s a significant challenge for governments, corporations, and other institutions that need to drive a faster energy transition.
Origins of Anti-Wind Conspiracy Theories
Since the 1950s, climate scientists have been warning that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions could bring profound, rapid, and relatively near-term environmental change, but the early renewable push was largely being sold as a way to break up the power of fossil fuel corporations.
In The Simpsons, for instance, industrial magnate Mr. Burns builds a skyscraper tall enough to block out the sun, driving all of Springfield to buy his nuclear energy. This was clearly satire, but it was based on a real-world notion that the fossil fuel industry would work to derail renewable adoption as long as it could.
There is evidence that this was a real fear, not a false one: as recently as 2004, then–Australian Prime Minister John Howard had gathered together a group of fossil fuel industry executives to form a so-called Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group. As it turned out, the government’s stated goal of curbing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions was not as important to the group as delaying the inevitable decarbonization of the power sector.
Wind farms also faced a PR challenge: while coal mines, oil and gas fields, and nuclear plants often exist far from the public eye, wind turbines are large, visible structures that developers often situate on ridgelines or in open fields in plain sight. This has made them a symbol for clean energy, but also made them a highly visible target for critics.
While the “wind turbine syndrome” was dismissed by the medical community as a “non-disease,” other fictions about wind farms have persisted in the public consciousness.
Academic research also backs up the anecdotal. In one study, Kevin Winter and his colleagues found that belief in conspiracy theories was much more predictive of opposition to wind power than age, gender, education, or political persuasion. Similar results were found in a pair of more recent surveys in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia: participants who were more likely to believe that conspiracy theories about climate change, government control, and energy security were also more likely to believe that wind turbines are “damaging our health.”
As with several other conspiracy theories, when you oppose wind turbines, it’s not a matter of whether your evidence-based claims are right or wrong: it’s a matter of worldviews. Fact-checking will not change a person’s mind if they believe, for example, that wind turbines poison groundwater or cause mass blackouts.
Presenting evidence to the contrary is largely ineffective at changing those attitudes, because the issue is not about evidence or arguments but about values and identity. As Winter and his colleagues put it, opposition to wind turbines “appears to be rooted in people’s worldviews.”
The Visual Symbolism of Wind Farms
Wind farms can also be visual symbols: for those in support of them, these large, prominent, and highly visible structures are visible signs of progress and innovation. For those on the other side, they can be metaphors for government overreach or the loss of control or agency.
Beyond the headline-level details of the debate, both sides have often been waging something of a deeper cultural battle. For decades, fossil fuels enabled a shared era of prosperity for large swaths of society. In some cases, the energy transition thus becomes something of an attack on the past or on people who are no longer willing or able to participate in it to the same extent.
Academics call this refusal to allow the past to be subject to negative consequences “anti-reflexivity.” There are ways in which Trump’s own messaging fits into this frame, often evoking a sense of nostalgia for the fossil fuel era.
