Why wind farms attract so much misinformation and conspiracy theory

If you think climate change is a hoax, you might believe wind turbines poison groundwater.

See full article...

 

[Ushio]

'Please stop using the perjorative climate science denying term of windmills.'

NEVER!

Windmills are awesome! we need to build more!

The UK has a few big windmill farms coming online over the next 3 years.

Sofia Offshore Wind Farm - 1400MW
Dogger Bank A - 1235MW
Dogger Bank B - 1235MW
East Anglia Three - 1372MW
Dogger Bank C - 1218MW
Inch Cape - 1080MW
Hornsea Three - 2852MW

Now the government just needs to speed up approving another set for 2028-2030 with even larger generating capacity!

 

[SixDegrees]

If you think climate change is a hoax, you might believe wind turbines poison groundwater.

Not at all surprising. It is extremely common, if you believe in any given conspiracy theory, to be very susceptible to other conspiracy theories as well. Find a flat-earther, and there's a good chance you've also found a climate change denier and Grassy Knoll conspiracist, who also tends to dwell on pizza parlor basements and prison suicides. Birds of a feather.

The excellent documentary "Behind the Curve," (Prime Video, elsewhere) though focused on flat earthers, examines this coherence in some detail.

 

[DarkMatterSparta]

This just proves a great deal of people are just fucking stupid!

 

[fenris_uy]

And these are problems that aren’t solved with the addition of more technology.

What? Climate change and our reliance on fossil fuels is a problem that is being solve with the addition of more technology. The clearer example is transportation, we are developing better batteries to increase car ranges and charge time, so that with more technology we can entice people to change from ICE cars to BEV. People aren't going to change just because it's better for the world.

 

[henryhbk]

I mean a wind farm causing ground water contamination isn't out of the realm of possibility and like most conspiracy theories there can be a grain of truth. Not the wind farm itself, but construction of it certainly could as trucks, cranes, helicopters, etc all spill fuel on the ground or some sealant/lubricant. And if the giant gearbox at the top happens to have a lubricant leak of a turbine that could soak into the ground below or contaminate a local stream when turbines are on hillsides which then leaches into local fish or the like. Once you have a grain of truth, easy to generalize it to a conspiracy. And once you have a grain of truth defending it is way harder: "Wind turbines do not contaminate ground water!" "What about the incident in the smith canyon wind farm?" Now you're stuck, you can't say never or can't because as demonstrated it can and did (and ignore the irony of the contamination likely being a fossil fuel). As for whales, that's just whacky , but presumably somewhere, sometime a whale beached itself near a wind farm and someone inappropriately made the correlation into causation (again ignoring the irony of fuel leak effects on marine mammals...)

The only mild dent I've made into a conspiracy theorist on renewables was the guy who was telling me my rooftop solar panels were a scam. My counter looking at this person clearly a blue-collar worker, "Well I'm not rich like you!" He did the cartoon head spinning effect "What do you mean, I'm not rich..." (no kidding, your name is embroidered on your blue work shirt) "But free money is landing on your roof and you're throwing it away, so you must be rich!" The guy at this point is no longer attacking solar power, but now having to defend his economic status, so tries the subversive government tack, "Well you would never make money on those if the government wasn't paying you!" sigh, well in truth we have high enough income to not qualify for most of the tax breaks, "I don't get any payments, subsidies or anything from "the government". (all we got was a town bulk discount from the 200 homes that purchased at once) The only people who give me money are the power company because I generate power for them like any business arrangement, I make and they buy or discount my own purchase from them, just like if I built a diesel generator making that much power" of course then we got to the "sun doesn't shine 24 hours so you can only generate during the day!" "So if I sat on your lawn tossing dollar bills in front of your house, if I only did it 12 hours a day you would refuse the free money?"

I didn't convince him, but I could see his faith in the argument had started to waver, as he then asked how much money we saved (about $8-$10K/year) and the panels had paid off in about 4 years (which now means the past 11 years have been profit!), based on our electricity usage and the capital cost. One very obvious misconception was he thought when the panels weren't generating we went dark, and I explained the whole concept of "we're just making money from making power, which we apply to our bill as a discount" I had to show him the history graph to make him believe the panels worked in the winter (even when thick snow covered them). I left him with, "regardless of what you think about climate change, free money is free money!" Giving an out to look at Solar without feeling he was betraying the conspiracy, that it was about free money landing on the roof not some woke movement (in reality I did put it in for reducing our carbon footprint) - as of today those panels have generated 95MWh offsetting our bill.

Edit: typo: real->realm

 

[ubercurmudgeon]

Like 19th century fears that telephones would spread diseases, wind farm conspiracy theories reflect deeper anxieties about change.

The same sentiment goes back a lot further than the 19th century. Even further back than the 17th century. And for good reason: a windmill turned me into a newt!



I got better.

 

[tepui]

The first paragraph sent me down a rabbit hole of researching the sentence "Trump calls them “windmills”—a climate denier trope." At face value, sure, Trump says a lot of stuff, but did "windmill" become a trope when I wasn't looking? Turns out, nope. The linked citation for "climate denier trope" goes to a Bluesky post with the text "Please stop using the perjorative [sic] climate science denying term of windmills. You don't call the turbines in coal, methane, and dams mills." This isn't evidence that the name is a climate denier trope (and no further evidence is cited), this is someone on Bluesky splitting hairs about definitions. And the definition itself? The use of the word windmill in relation to electric power goes back to 1879, and is an accepted mainstream term for the structure.

I've been trying to figure out why this bothered me so much, and I think it's that this style of citing random stuff on the internet to make a point that most readers will probably just skim over and file away can be a source of significant misinformation. In fact, when searching in Gemini for "is the term windmill a climate denier trope", it's response is:

Using the term "windmill" for modern wind turbines is a rhetorical tactic used by climate change deniers to misrepresent renewable energy. The word evokes an outdated image of simple, wooden structures, obscuring the scale and technological sophistication of modern wind power infrastructure

The primary source it cites? The original post of the above article from the Conversation. All of this is to say: it would be a valuable and interesting piece of reporting if it was true that there was a particular rhetorical trick the climate deniers we using to diminish trust in wind farms. But it's not true, and it's easy to show this. The rhetoric of climate science is an important topic, and sloppy writing like this is not effective science communication.

 

[peterford]

Meanwhile, advocates of renewables—especially wind—often found it difficult to build public support for wind, in part because the existing power providers (mines, oil fields, nuclear) tend to be out of sight and out of mind.

This is the key part. Most adults are barely grown up children most of the time and we hate having to deal with consequences or externalities. Even turning to conspiracy and denialism to avoid them.

Energy dense sources putting out an invisible gas was easy to ignore, solar and wind farms are not.

 

[Sajuuk]

What? Climate change and our reliance on fossil fuels is a problem that is being solve with the addition of more technology. The clearer example is transportation, we are developing better batteries to increase car ranges and charge time, so that with more technology we can entice people to change from ICE cars to BEV. People aren't going to change just because it's better for the world.

I believe the argument is that the existence of technology, in-of-itself, is not enough. It has to be socially accepted, adopted at scale, and adopted soon enough for it to matter. The greatest and greenest EV matters little if it is inaccessible to 99.99% of the planet, and it matters even less when the POTUS says “that’s illegal now.”

From another perspective, there’s also no technology on the horizon that would, for example, make the average American lifestyle sustainable without massive individual and cultural changes.

 

[toolery]

I guess Mr. Burns didn’t have to go through the trouble of building a tower to blot out the sun - he could have just spread misinformation about the dangers of sunlight and donated handsomely to Mayor Quimby. Problem solved!

 

[Amiga4000T]

Trump just ordered the construction of Orstead wind project to halt despite 80% completion…

It’s so stupid I’m at loss of words!

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litig...d-project-deepening-industry-woes-2025-08-22/

 

[Ushio]

I guess Mr. Burns didn’t have to go through the trouble of building a tower to blot out the sun - he could have just spread misinformation about the dangers of sunlight and donated handsomely to Mayor Quimby. Problem solved!

'misinformation about the dangers of sunlight'


What misinformation? sunlight is incredibly dangerous you should always cover up in strong direct sun if you don't have sunscreen/sunblock on. Skin cancer is common and very lethal.

 

[MacBrave]

About 10-12 years ago a wind farm company tried getting a project approved in my mostly rural county. The county commissioners were all vehemently against the idea and shot it down. Then about 5 years later they easily approved an 1800 acre solar farm project which has been up and running for about a year now.

Now the big controversy is a 100-700 acre data center facility that some real estate developer is trying to get zoned/approved. The NIMBY's have come out in force over this one, so it also is unlikely to get approved.

 

[ColdWetDog]

The first paragraph sent me down a rabbit hole of researching the sentence "Trump calls them “windmills”—a climate denier trope." At face value, sure, Trump says a lot of stuff, but did "windmill" become a trope when I wasn't looking? Turns out, nope. The linked citation for "climate denier trope" goes to a Bluesky post with the text "Please stop using the perjorative [sic] climate science denying term of windmills. You don't call the turbines in coal, methane, and dams mills." This isn't evidence that the name is a climate denier trope (and no further evidence is cited), this is someone on Bluesky splitting hairs about definitions. And the definition itself? The use of the word windmill in relation to electric power goes back to 1879, and is an accepted mainstream term for the structure.

I've been trying to figure out why this bothered me so much, and I think it's that this style of citing random stuff on the internet to make a point that most readers will probably just skim over and file away can be a source of significant misinformation. In fact, when searching in Gemini for "is the term windmill a climate denier trope", it's response is:



The primary source it cites? The original post of the above article from the Conversation. All of this is to say: it would be a valuable and interesting piece of reporting if it was true that there was a particular rhetorical trick the climate deniers we using to diminish trust in wind farms. But it's not true, and it's easy to show this. The rhetoric of climate science is an important topic, and sloppy writing like this is not effective science communication.

The whole article is really ... not much. No new ground. No cogent assemblage of information. Yes, it's by and large true - other than the occasional troll here nobody is seriously going to deny any of this. I understand it is Saturday but I really don't see that TFA does anything but give readers a chance to vent. Which is OK, but it isn't like Ars hasn't published hundreds (thousands at this stage?) articles on climate change.

Grump.

 

[icl1900-G3]

I'm baffled how Trump manages to tie his shoelaces. What a gibbon.

 

[Komarov]

I'm baffled how Trump manages to tie his shoelaces. What a gibbon.

Do not insult gibbons.

 

[Oldnoobguy]

Do not insult gibbons.

Or slime molds. How about calling him candida auris, an incurable deadly fungal infection?

 

[MisterBaxter]

'misinformation about the dangers of sunlight'


What misinformation? sunlight is incredibly dangerous you should always cover up in strong direct sun if you don't have sunscreen/sunblock on. Skin cancer is common and very lethal.

You seem to have interpreted "misinformation about the dangers as sunlight" as meaning "any statement about the dangers of sunlight is misinformation"

Here is some possible misinformation about the dangers of sunlight, which Mr Burns could spread:

"Sunlight makes you magnetic"
"The sun is a wavy-gravy hippy plot to put nuclear power plants out of business"
"Plants don't actually like sunlight, they all do better in pitch blackness"
"The sun directly causes low Squishee availability by inducing harmonics in the machine wiring"

 

[zAmboni]

The whole article is really ... not much. No new ground. No cogent assemblage of information. Yes, it's by and large true - other than the occasional troll here nobody is seriously going to deny any of this. I understand it is Saturday but I really don't see that TFA does anything but give readers a chance to vent. Which is OK, but it isn't like Ars hasn't published hundreds (thousands at this stage?) articles on climate change.

Grump.

When reading the article I was thinking that I have heard this all before. Yea there isn't anything really new, but then I was fine with it.

Not everyone is up to date with all subjects...and everyone who learns something new and knows what is going on is another person who can join in the fight against misinformation and denialism.

Heck, I'm now prepared to use the quote "So if I sat on your lawn tossing dollar bills in front of your house, if I only did it 12 hours a day you would refuse the free money?" In a future conversation.

 

[Oldmanalex]

You can't fix stupid, especially when deep down they kind of understand that they are wrong. Around here my lawn is still growing in August, the second year in a row this hitherto unprecedented action has occurred. It is only about 10 years since the lawn did not turn completely brown every July, and not require mowing for well over a month. (Amazing that Clausius-Clapeyron is correct and hotter air carries more moisture.) Few are so stupid that they do not notice this, but in many it induces unease, guilt lite, and a need to disbelieve their own lying eyes. As there are a lot of these people, most of whom will dig their own graves rather than face the possibility of being wrong, and they are amply funded by the very wealthy fossil fuel barons, who now own the US government lock, stock, and corrupt Supreme Court justice, we are probably totally boned. Which is OK for me in the twilight of my years, but rather less cool for my middle school grandkids. But hey! Isn't it all about me?

 

[SixDegrees]

The windmills scatter the mind-controlling 5G signals so they spread over a wider area. I thought this was obvious.

 

[Komarov]

Or slime molds. How about calling him candida auris, an incurable deadly fungal infection?

Slime molds can do calculus without brains. Come on, now, surely you can think of a better comparison.

 

[Snark218]

The whole article is really ... not much. No new ground. No cogent assemblage of information. Yes, it's by and large true - other than the occasional troll here nobody is seriously going to deny any of this. I understand it is Saturday but I really don't see that TFA does anything but give readers a chance to vent. Which is OK, but it isn't like Ars hasn't published hundreds (thousands at this stage?) articles on climate change.

Grump.

Do keep in mind, though, that not every reader of this site is the kind of weirdo you and I are, and may not visit the site multiple times a day, and may not be obsessively up to date on the state of climate research and coverage - and many of those might be idly scrolling Apple News or whatever on a Saturday morning.

 

[timeline404]

Conspiracy travels faster than transmission lines.

 

[eukiwi]

And let us please not forget that Trump's hatred of them stems principally from the fact that he hates how they look off the coast of his Scotland golf course. It's just all about him, as usual.

Then, his hick, Facebook University base who think Rumble will replace that communist, lefty YouTube any day now, are of course slavering all over themselves with glee soaking up everything he spews out.

We are heading into (are already in?) a dark age of ignorance, and the celebration of ignorance.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

Conspiracy travels faster than transmission lines.

I heard putting transmission lines next to people's houses causes conspiracy theories! That's why they do it, so you're too busy looking for Bigfoot to see what The Government is doing right under our noses!

 

[Keokil]

Not at all surprising. It is extremely common, if you believe in any given conspiracy theory, to be very susceptible to other conspiracy theories as well. Find a flat-earther, and there's a good chance you've also found a climate change denier and Grassy Knoll conspiracist, who also tends to dwell on pizza parlor basements and prison suicides. Birds of a feather.

The excellent documentary "Behind the Curve," (Prime Video, elsewhere) though focused on flat earthers, examines this coherence in some detail.

The term of art is ‘crank magnetism’.

 

[Snark218]

Beneath the misinformation, often driven by money or political power, there’s a deeper issue. Some people—perhaps Trump among them—don’t want to deal with the fact that fossil technologies, which brought prosperity and a sense of control, are also causing environmental crises.

I think this is also wrapped up strongly in the conservative sense of tribal identity and affiliation. Mining (especially coal), oil, gas, and other extractive industries are the economic lifeblood of conservative areas like Texas and the interior West and Great Plains. They look at miners, riggers, drillers, and they see people who look, act, and believe like them, who share their values, who make their money and contribute to society in a straightforward, blue collar sort of way that strikes them as honest and true and immediately obvious. And they see a clear, obvious connection between oil, gas, and coal and other core economic engines of their areas, like ranching, trucking, farming, heavy industry - even the trucks they like to drive.

And people like that have a long history of simmering resentment against the highly educated, the urban, the coastal, the progressive. They distrust the government and regulations, generally viewing them as a hard limit on their ability to make as much money as possible very quickly, and tend towards a paranoid sense of mistrust of outsiders and their ideas and values. They idealize being the tyrant of their own lives, the center of a tiny universe inside which they're emperors and outside which everyone can get fucked, free to make as much money as possible and slap their kids and wives around and drive big trucks and never, ever get questioned or limited or told they're wrong or forced to change the smallest detail of their lives.

It's no surprise that climate change strikes them as a bunch of shifty, ivory-tower, California pencil-necks coming for them and people like them. They were primed and ready to hear the message big oil and gas had for them. I don't think there was even any way to prevent it; they'd have felt that way regardless, it was just amplified by denier propaganda and conservative media.

And these are problems that aren’t solved with the addition of more technology. It offends their sense of invulnerability, of dominance. This “anti-reflexivity,” as some academics call it, is a refusal to reflect on the costs of past successes.

An extreme resistance to admit serious fault or error - the kind of fault that calls one's moral foundation or major tenets of a political ideology or worldview - is also a major feature of narcissism, is common in parents with a highly authoritarian parenting style and their children, is common among the very religious, and is obviously not uncommon among abusers. I'm not saying one has to be a narcissist, an authoritarian, a religious extremist, or an abuser to be a modern American conservative, but.....actually, yeah, never mind, I am saying that. At least three out of the four seem to be endemic.

It is also bound up with identity. In some corners of the online “manosphere,” concerns over climate change are being painted as effeminate.

I don't think this is at all organic, however; grifters gonna grift.

Many boomers, especially white heterosexual men like Trump, have felt disoriented as their world has shifted and changed around them. The clean energy transition symbolizes part of this change. Perhaps this is a good way to understand why Trump is lashing out at “windmills.”

I'm 42, right on that Gen X/Millennial divide, a weird micro-cohort sometimes called the Oregon Trail Generation. We played Oregon Trail on monochrome Apple IIs, and also Quake II. We had 28.8k dial-up when we were kids but broadband when we were young adults. 9/11 was my first week of college. Facebook came out my last year of college. The 2008 recession hit while I was finishing up grad school. The pandemic hit when my son was in kindergarten. I'm an ecologist who specializes in climate change. Which is all a long way of saying that these fucking nitwits wouldn't last an hour in the asylum that raised me, and I cannot articulate how little sympathy I have for the tantrums of boomers who can't handle change and thought the world got handed to them on a silver platter to squander as they wished.

 

[timeline404]

I heard putting transmission lines next to people's houses causes conspiracy theories! That's why they do it, so you're too busy looking for Bigfoot to see what The Government is doing right under our noses!

They fight the lines, then gripe about blackouts.

 

[Mentil]

And research shows that, once these fears are embedded in someone’s worldview, no amount of fact-checking is likely to shift them.

A more effective tack might be to claim that Satan buried fossil fuels in the Underworld in order to tempt humanity to use 'devil energy', and that God created the Sun (which uses nuclear processes) as an energy source we're supposed to use.

Thus solar and nuclear are good, fossil fuels bad. Wind turbines reach towards the Heavens, therefore good. Hydroelectric is neutral, but that's still better than fossil fuels.

 

[EricM2]

Quite generally, the belief in conspiracies elevates the affected individual above others, as only him/her really understands what's going on.
As such the effects from this belief provides some of the effects to an individual comparable to a dose of Methamphetamine. The individual experiences

• higher energy
• raised self-esteem
• raised confidence.

Even the effects of a meth "comedown" or "crash" can be observed in affected individuals, when conspiracy theories are being proven wrong or being perceived as "supressed", as happened with e.g. some Covid-related conspiracies:

• Depression
• Paranoia
• Psychosis

Viewing a person affected by a conspiracy belief as a kind of drug addict, might provide some new perspective to treat the dependency.

If you think climate change is a hoax, you might believe wind turbines poison groundwater.

This would also explain, why people seem to jump easily from one theory to another or why they can hold seemly conflicting beliefs simultaneously. The actual conspiracy itself is only a means to reach the actual target: Getting high on feeling superior.

In this context, industries or political parties creating ( or "hinting at") conspiracy theories as part of their public relations efforts can be compared to handing out drugs to the public in order to earn more money or votes.

 

[Mentil]

It is also bound up with identity. In some corners of the online “manosphere,” concerns over climate change are being painted as effeminate.

Seemingly contradicts this:

Conspiracy thinking is a stronger predictor of opposition than age, gender, education, or political leaning.

I'd think gender would be a bigger predictor if the manosphere factor was significant, even though coal-rolling is definitely a thing.

 

[dadsfolk]

This article touches on what I call “the great Liberal fallacy” - that if you tell people the truth, they’ll change their minds. In fact, humans are not fundamentally rational - they react emotionally far faster (“instinctively”) than they do intellectually, and the emotional framework which governs response is built up from early training and social environments such as peer groups. Generally speaking, beliefs are not rational, but rationalizations which are consistent with our emotional predispositions, and those predispositions form the structure of our personal moralities.

For an in-depth analysis of this, see The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a disturbing and illuminating exploration of the roots of what we call “morality”, and how it differs between liberals and conservatives. You may also want to read The Misinformation Age, by O’Connor and Weatherall.

How do we form beliefs - especially false ones? How do they persist? Why do they spread? Why are false beliefs so intransigent - even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? And, perhaps more important, what can we do to change them?

 

[Taunted Happy Fun Ball]

Two things are obvious however: wind turbines are ugly and noisy.

No. They look majestic AF.

 

[joebub]

I would not at all be surprised to find out that oil companies put out disinformation on wind farms and solar. I mean, the GOP media apparatus is doing that right now.

 

[Spud Spudly]

it’s a freaking windmill we’ve had them for centuries