“Wait till you see the size of these windmills, and look at the beauty of the designs, they’re really nice to look at. And they kill all the birds, they drive the whales loco … the whales get loco when they go after these windmills and their fins are sliced to pieces. You know, death rays. Oh, they’re horrible, they’re really horrible. Windmills, I’ve always found them to be a con job.” (Remarks by former President Donald Trump at a press conference meant to be about a trade deal with the European Union)

Mr. Trump has made similar statements about wind turbines in the past, characterising them as ugly, inefficient, and dangerous for the public and the environment. As striking as these comments are, and as much as they were no doubt intended as a bit of theatrical political baiting, they are not isolated moments of rhetorical ventriloquism. Instead, they are the latest expression of an international pattern of conspiracy thinking about renewable energy, and in particular, wind power.

Mr. Trump’s habit of calling turbines “windmills” (a common rhetorical shift among those on the denial end of climate debates) recalls earlier episodes of moral panic about technological change and renewable energy in particular. In the mid-19th century, for example, people were convinced that telephones could spread diseases. Now, it is turbines that are vehicles for some kind of malevolent human conspiracy, designed to cover the world with death rays.

Underneath these protestations, and according to research from scientists who study conspiracy thinking, is a deep well of anti-establishment distrust. Anxiety is not rational. The prevalence of conspiracy theories in one area is predictive of those in another, from chemtrails to 5G. Not only that, but once a conspiracy belief is formed, it is extremely difficult to change it with new information or fact-checking. That is a challenging prospect for governments and businesses, and other institutions hoping to speed the adoption of clean energy.

The sources and spread of wind conspiracies

Climate science has known about the potentially profound and relatively imminent threat of carbon dioxide emissions to the climate since at least the 1950s, but early efforts to sell renewables were often framed as a way to break up monopolies that fossil fuel companies enjoyed.

You can find examples of this in popular culture, too. In one episode of The Simpsons, the millionaire energy tycoon Mr. Burns builds an energy-gobbling tower tall enough to blot out the sun, forcing Springfield residents to purchase his nuclear power instead. It’s a cartoon example of the kind of monopolistic power that fossil fuel interests were, and remain, capable of wielding.

In 2004, then–Australian Prime Minister John Howard assembled a group of fossil fuel executives under the title of the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group. The group’s goal was to advise on how to reduce emissions, but it did the opposite: Its task was to slow the rise of renewable energy to protect the status quo of coal, oil, and gas.

Wind farms also pose a new problem for perceptions of energy. People living near coal mines, oil fields, natural gas pipelines, transmission lines, and nuclear plants may not see those facilities or any impacts they may be having. Wind turbines, on the other hand, are often built in clusters on ridgelines or open plains. They are highly visible, which has made them a magnet for criticism and conspiracy theories.

Claims of “wind turbine syndrome,” which doctors and health officials called a “non-disease,” spread for years without scientific evidence. Studies such as the one in Kevin Winter and colleagues’ aptly titled “Wind farms and the clustering of conspiracy beliefs” show that demographics are much less of a factor in perceptions of wind than belief systems. Their study showed that conspiracy thinking was a much stronger predictor of whether someone living in Germany opposed or supported local wind projects than their age, gender, education level, party identification, or religiosity.

The researchers’ findings have been replicated in surveys conducted over the past few years in the U.S., U.K., and Australia. A consistent finding across all these studies is that people more likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, whether about climate change or geoengineering or government control of the internet, or energy security, are also more likely to think wind turbines are harmful.