When Donald Trump recently claimed, during what was supposed to be a press conference about an EU trade deal, that wind turbines were a “con job” that “drive whales loco”, kill birds and even people, he wasn’t just repeating old myths. He was tapping into a global pattern of conspiracy theories around renewable energy – particularly wind farms. (Trump calls them “windmills” – a climate denier trope.)

Like 19th century fears that telephones would spread diseases, wind farm conspiracy theories reflect deeper anxieties about change. They combine distrust of government, nostalgia for the fossil fuel era, and a resistance to confronting the complexities of the modern world.

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

Although we’ve known about climate change from carbon dioxide as probable and relatively imminent since at least the 1950s, early arguments for renewables tended to be........

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