Former United States President Donald Trump was recently holding a press conference to announce an EU trade deal. As the media grappled for a seat at the limited-access event, he began to riff on a more predictable subject: renewable energy. Turbines were “a con job,” he said, according to the Associated Press. They make whales “loco,” kill birds, and are responsible for people “dropping dead.”

Taken in isolation, these are merely soundbites. Colorful insults are part of Trump’s rhetorical toolkit, and he frequently throws them out regardless of relevance. But in fact, Trump is hardly alone in his opinion on wind farms. Conspiracy theories about renewables, especially wind power, have flourished in many other countries in recent years.

Trump regularly mischaracterizes wind turbines as “windmills.” This term has come to stand in as a kind of linguistic shibboleth among climate deniers, a way of signaling that one believes wind farms to be both pernicious and misleading. A similar phenomenon emerged a century before, when the electric telegraph was derided as a means to spread syphilis, or another panic in the 1980s, when vaccinations were said to cause autism. In each case, as with Trump, a technology that posed a threat to existing ways of living or to the status quo was demonized in public consciousness.

Suspicions about wind power are the product of more than an irrational reaction to an unfamiliar technology. As studies have shown, they are stable and largely immune to fact-checking or corrections. For the government and other organizations that would like to hasten the transition to clean energy, this presents a significant challenge.

Wind Farms and Conspiracy Theories: A Troubled History

Climate scientists have been sounding the alarm about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions since at least the 1950s. By the 1980s, the energy transition was well underway. Wind power was among the more prominent technologies, but the messaging focused less on its relative merits than on the perceived stranglehold of fossil fuel companies on the market. The Simpsons famously parodied this narrative in a storyline from the late 1990s, in which energy mogul Mr. Burns constructs a massive tower that blocks out the sun and forces the citizens of Springfield to buy his nuclear power.

The cartoon parable exaggerated for comedic effect, of course, but the fear of fossil fuel companies co-opting or delaying the transition to renewables was a real one, and not without precedent. As the Guardian reported in 2004, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard established a fossil fuel industry advisory group titled the Low Emissions Technology Advisory Group, or LETAG. It had no remit to accelerate decarbonization; on the contrary, the group sought to protect coal, oil, and gas from the threat of renewables.

Wind turbines also faced cultural and psychological barriers. Coal mines, oil fields, and nuclear plants are, by and large, removed from public view. Wind farms, by contrast, are highly visible. The most obvious locations for wind turbines are on ridgelines or open plains. They are hard to miss and, therefore, easier to target. When campaigners declared that wind turbine syndrome was a “non-disease,” a self-fulfilling conspiracy theory had already taken root in the public imagination.

Academic work has supported those findings: it’s less a question of age, education, income, or gender. A German study led by Kevin Winter found that belief in conspiracies was a stronger predictor of opposition to wind farm development than all the other demographic factors combined. The same was true in recent research from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Survey respondents who were more likely to believe in other conspiracy theories—about climate change, government control of society, or energy security—were also more likely to view wind turbines as dangerous.

Wind farms have also become convenient scapegoats. Because they are both highly visible and visible only to a limited extent in practice, they make for an easy target. The most extreme theories—that wind farms cause everything from cancer to mass blackouts—are readily disproven by data. For many of those who are convinced of these ideas, however, the facts do not change their minds. As the German study found, opposition to wind farms is “rooted in people’s worldviews,” not in a lack of understanding.

Wind turbines are often used as symbols. For their supporters, they are a sign of the future and progress and human ingenuity; for opponents, an imposition by central government, or a visible sign of climate change itself. In either case, they are a symbol. The question is, a symbol of what?

In some ways, it’s about past glories. The fossil fuel economy created wealth in the past and rapid industrialization. For some, the suggestion of environmental costs to that growth is anathema. As researchers put it, the unwillingness to “engage in reflection about possible undesired side-effects of valued systems” is a form of “anti-reflexivity.” Trump, who often harks back to the supposed glories of the fossil fuel era, often fits that description.