Occasionally – not as frequently as I should – I search Google Scholar for topics that interest me. So it was the other day when I typed in “Wind farms community effects” or similar into the search box. In ecology, a community is the animals and plants and other taxa that live in a certain habitat. And it is known that putting a wind farm on top of that habitat can change its community – a story for another day.

Of course, there are other kinds of communities too, so the major drawback of using that search term is that you end up with a lot of chaff about human communities. Thus it was that I came across by chance a paper with an extraordinary title:

Anticipating and defusing the role of conspiracy beliefs in shaping opposition to wind farms

The very title seemed to imply that there was no good reason to oppose a wind farm, and that only a conspiracy ideationist would do so. I mean, can you imagine…

Anticipating and defusing the role of conspiracy beliefs in shaping support for wind farms

?

I can’t. But I would think there should be no a priori reason to assume support or opposition is either right or wrong, or that either position requires conspiracy beliefs.

Suitably horrified, I decided to read the paper to see just what sort of conspiracy beliefs the authors had in mind. Had NASA, perhaps, faked the moon landing?

The authors (Winter et al) got in my bad books right away, with the very first sentence of the Abstract:

Reaching net-zero targets requires massive increases in wind energy production, but efforts to build wind farms can meet stern local opposition.

Not a valid assumption, I would say. The results:

…we found moderate-to-large relationships between various indices of conspiracy beliefs and wind farm opposition. Indeed, the relationship between wind farm opposition and conspiracy beliefs was many times greater than its relationship with age, gender, education and political orientation.

OK, so what outré conspiracy beliefs did the wind farm opposers adhere to? For that we have to turn to the Supplementary. To what degree do you agree with the following propositions, on a scale from 1 to 7?

1. There are many very important things happening in the world about which the public is not informed.

2. Those at the top do whatever they want.

3. A few powerful groups of people determine the destiny of millions.

4. There are secret organizations that have great influence on political decisions.

5. I think that the various conspiracy theories circulating in the media are absolute nonsense. (R)

6. Politicians and other leaders are nothing but the string puppets of powers operating in the background.

7. Most people do not recognize to what extent our life is determined by conspiracies that are concocted in secret.

8. There is no good reason to distrust governments, intelligence agencies, or the media. (R)

9. International intelligence agencies have their hands in our everyday life to a much larger degree than people assume.

10. Secret organizations can manipulate people psychologically so that they do not notice how their life is being controlled by others.

11. There are certain political circles with secret agendas that are very influential.

12. Most people do not see how much our lives are determined by plots hatched in secret.

(Note the two reversed questions, there just to check if you were still awake.)

I don’t know about you, but I probably scored quite highly on the conspiracy ideation index. Then again, if there was a referendum on a wind farm development near me, I would vote “no.” As if! We don’t get referenda in the UK. It’s almost as if our lives are determined by a secret cabal of billionaires operating from a well-appointed bunker, whose intention is to return us to a good old-fashioned state of serfdom.

Anyway… where was I before I had a minor attack of conspiracism…?

Oh yes. Remember the title? It included the rather loaded word ‘defusing.’ Let’s defuse those conspiracy beliefs and make the little serfs think in the approved manner. How should we do that? From the Abstract once more:

Information provision increased support, even among those high in conspiracy mentality. However, information provision was less effective when it was presented as a debate (that is, including negative arguments) and among participants who endorsed specific conspiracy theories about wind farms.

OK, let’s hear about the effective information provision – the stuff that came without opposition. What sort of things were the participants told? They were given 7 factoids; factoid 1, for example, reads as follows (translated by the paper’s authors from the German):

1.) Can the wind turbines contribute to climate protection? The potential for electricity generation by the five planned wind turbines is about 40 million kilowatt hours per year. This corresponds to a CO2 saving of about 24,000 tons compared to conventional energy sources. Thus, the planned turbines will make a significant contribution to climate protection in the region.

Regardless of what you think about Net Zero and the CO2 savings from wind power, the final sentence rather lets the item down. Perhaps a nuance has been lost in translation; but there is no prospect at all for the new wind farm to protect the region’s climate. According to factoid 2, the wind farm “ …increases local supply security…”; it respects “all regulations regarding the distance of wind turbines from populated areas, as well as nature and species protection” according to factoid 6.

Kudos to the authors though, because in their balanced information provision, they made some sceptical talking points, such as:

Wind turbines pose a risk to certain bird species and the construction will drive some animal species out of their natural environment.

At this point the information becomes less effective at changing minds, perhaps because it more accurately reflects the actual facts. The authors lament,

…it is sobering that the positive effects of supportive evidence could be neutralized by counterarguments.

What to do? The last part of the Abstract has the answer:

Thus, the data suggest preventive measures are more realistic than informational interventions to curb the potentially negative impact of conspiracy beliefs.

Yes, rather than allow the people to see both sides of the argument and make up their own minds, they prefer to employ the “inoculation” and “pre-bunking” strategies of one of the channel’s favourite guests, Professor Lewandowsky.

It is somewhat hurtful to think that, in some researchers’ minds, wind farms are an unalloyed good that can only be opposed by those of us with psychological conditions. Whereas, in some sceptics’ minds, wind farms can only be supported by those of us with psychological conditions. (Not true. I don’t believe that. I’m just reframing it for you to show how arrogant it sounds.) Where does this lack of awareness come from?

If only the authors had heard of the Fable of the Dog and the Wolf, perhaps they too could reframe their thinking to what we might call a “noninformative” prior. Or perhaps they know it well, and think that the wolf in the tale has fallen victim to conspiracy theorising and needs to be pre-bunked or inoculated or dosed up with Mogadon.

Featured Image

A wind farm that was opposed to destruction. (Not true. The photo shows a heap of bits of turbine blades and towers at Sweetwater, Texas, that are cluttering the place up because they are impossible to recycle.)

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19 Comments

  1. I see that Lewandowsky has a couple of references and also this:

    Peer review
    Peer review information
    Nature Energy thanks Roland Imhoff, Stephen Lewandowsky and Joseph Uscinski for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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  2. Adding insult to injury, this tosh was probably produced at the tax-payers’ expense!!

    Jit: pls can you provide a link to that picture? I can see uses for it in discussions about wind farms. Thanks.

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  3. Mike, if you would like to read the story of those dead wind turbine bits, it’s at https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/

    The pic is taken from Google Earth. If you go to Sweetwater, Texas & find the cemetery, then the blade dump is immediately south. However, on GE most of the blade dump has recently been rubbed out and replaced with an older image (because of the clouds, it would seem). So you have to use the time travel feature and go back to the 2023 image to get the same view I showed.

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  4. Thanks Jit.
    That’s a miserable story. As our wind farms age, I guess we can expect to see similar dumping problems. Indeed I have a vague memory of something like this happening in Germany but on a smaller scale.

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  5. And what about those off-shore wind turbines that self-destruct and fall into the sea? Is there any legal requirement upon anybody to recover any or all of the fallen and still-standing parts? Or are they left as a hazard to shipping and marine life?

    As prof. Gordon Hughes has shown, off-shore wind turbines deteriorate more quickly than those on-shore. So what happens to life-expired off-shore wind turbines (if they have not previously self-destructed)? Who, if anyone, is responsible for their removal? Or are they to be left as a reminder of the success of rent-seekers in extracting huge sums from gullible governments for unsustainable, unreliable and expensive electricity? For some reason the following link seems pertinent:-
    https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/ccc-deceived-parliament-and-british-people

    I wonder if there is a martime version of the poem ‘Ozymandias’; it would be appropriate in these strange times.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias

    Regards, John.

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  6. According to factoid 2, the wind farm “ …increases local supply security…”

    Unless it doesn’t e.g. the power is sent from Scotland to England.

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  7. Oldbrew – yes, that’s what I thought. I don’t see how a wind farm can increase security of supply anywhere.

    John – thank you for making me reach behind me to get The Poetical Works of Shelley (OUP 1927 ed.) off the shelf. A few pages before Ozymandias is “To The Lord Chancellor” which includes these lines:

    “Thy country’s curse is on thee! Justice sold,
    Truth trampled, Nature’s landmarks overthrown,
    And heaps of fraud-accumulated gold,
    Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction’s throne.”

    [Shelley was not railing about wind farms, but that his children had been removed from his custody. It’s a long story.]

    Liked by 2 people

  8. Thanks for the link to the “study”. Talk about groupthink! How anyone could write the following paragraph and continue to think that windfarms are a good idea is beyond me:

    For many countries, achieving net-zero targets will require an extraordinary ramping up of energy sourced from wind. For example, when Princeton University modelled a pathway to net-zero emissions in the United States that relied entirely on renewable energy, they calculated it would require over 1 million square kilometres of land, roughly the size of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Louisiana combined. In Germany, the current government agreed to designate 2% of the country’s landscape for the construction of wind farms. The scale of escalation suggests a fundamental transformation in people’s exposure to—and relationship with—wind farms in the future.

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  10. Thanks for the link. Much to agree with in the body of Smith’s essay, but I’m not sure about the preamble. This:

    Of course, now entering its third year, the war would have been over inside the first year if the United States had not supplied Zelensky with massive quantities of armaments; prolonging the suffering at a comfortable distance, while boosting stock prices inside the military-industrial complex.

    “Prolonging the suffering at a comfortable distance” is the sort of rhetorical point that Americans might have made against supporting Britain 80-odd years ago. It’s rather cynical.

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  11. First sentence not quoted:

    By the way, as I found, anyone trying to objectively assess the situation is clearly a Putin puppet, in case you didn’t know.

    David Sacks calls that a smear:

    And implies Zelensky is lying:

    The Reuters fact-checkers today seem to back up the last tweet: Zelenskiy says 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed since Russia invaded. If he is lying does that matter? Does it affect the analogy with 80-odd years ago?

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  12. With apologies to David Sacks, the Ukraine war is not being fought on X. If the Ukrainians want to surrender territory in exchange for security guarantees, then they should be supported in that. If they want to fight on, ditto. Is Sacks suggesting that the West withdraws support? Then watch as the the Ukrainians are ground down and defeated? I do not know where this idea that the West is willing to fight “until the last Ukrainian” comes from. What is being suggested? That a more honourable move would be to send a few NATO divisions in?

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  13. Sacks is talking about the Ukraine War *debate*, as he says, which most definitely is happening on X. He thinks Zelensky is lying and is not being called out on that by his ‘supporters’ in the Western elites or on X. My question stands. Does it matter if he is lying?

    Here’s something else from today that I’d never seen recorded before, from Peter Hitchens, going back to the coup in February 2014:

    The then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, made a wholly inaccurate statement to the House of Commons on March 4, 2014. He said that Yanukovych was removed ‘by the very large majorities required under the constitution’. This is simply untrue. And so the future Lord Hague’s next assertion that ‘it is wrong to question the legitimacy of the new authorities’ seriously misled Parliament.

    I took this up with Lord Hague. After it became plain he had no good defence of his actions, he stopped replying to me and fell silent. Pathetically, an awkward letter I sent to his official address was returned to me adorned with a sticker saying he was not known there. If we had a proper Opposition in this country, he would never have been able to get away with this. But we do not.

    The events of February 2014 split Ukraine and began a filthy little war in the east of the country in which (among other tragedies and horrors) many civilians died at the hands of the Ukrainian army. The disgusting Russian invasion two years ago, indefensible and barbaric, was the second stage of the war, not the start of it.

    — Who began this filthy war? Why didn’t we side with democracy against the Kiev mob?

    Any peace deal now will be ‘squalid’ as Hitchens says elsewhere, comparing it even to the deal with Stalin at Yalta towards the end of WW2. (Not ‘sordid’ as I falsely remembered on another thread – but it’s much the same thing.) There’s no moral high ground to be had.

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  14. Few things in life are black and white. Shades of grey abound.

    However, I am fairly clear that whatever the wrongs of internal Ukrainian politics, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is appalling, and cannot and should not be minimised by reference to the wrongs of internal Ukrainian politics. After all, Putin has form – and lots of it. Every time he gets away with aggression, he tries a bit more. The comparisons with Hitler in the 1930s may be overdone, but the parallels are definitely there.

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  15. My quip about Twitter merely meant that opinions there don’t matter – the opinions that matter are those from among the people who have the option to trade their freedom for such safety as is to be had upon surrender. (To judge by the stories of Ukrainian soldiers being executed upon surrender, not much safety is to be had by doing so.) The Twitter people have no such balancing problem – they can pontificate on one side, or both, if they like. There are no consequences; they have no skin in the game.

    Regarding Zelenskyy’s minimisation of losses: no, I don’t think it changes anything. Are the other side reporting their losses accurately? There is a reason that the Corinthians don’t win all that often. Part of winning must be proving your resolve to the enemy – something that Churchill’s wartime speeches exemplify. If the enemy thinks he has you on wobbly legs, he will take encouragement from that. That is why you have to appear strong when you are weak, etc.

    I don’t know the facts of the Euromaidan revolution. I will note that it is difficult to beat Russia’s preferred candidate in a fair election. And there is more than one reason to stop replying to a correspondent. Hitchens might think that he won the debate. Maybe Hague discontinued things in exasperation?

    Mark, I agree, although I note that there is a degree of hysteria in predictions of Putin’s future enterprises. He’s not going to attack a NATO/EU country. But if Ukraine is defeated, Moldova would not sleep easy.

    Final point: apparently the 2-year anniversary of the invasion was not mentioned in Russian media.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. Would all of the tragedies in Ukraine have happened if the West/NATO/UN had taken a much tougher line when Russia annexed the Crimea?
    The leader of the US team sent to admonish Putin was one J. Biden. Putin faced them down and clearly felt emboldened to push further. Echoes of the Rhineland, then Sudetenland in the 30s.
    It is sadly ironic that our foreign secretary is talking tough…where was he when Crimea was invaded? Oh yes, he was our PM…..

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  17. And in 2003, as I vividly remember, the Tory leader of the opposition supported Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq, speaking in the House of Commons, comparing Saddam with Hitler and any refusal to confront him with the appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s. His name? William Hague. That’s one of the reasons the passage from Hitchens this Sunday hit me hard.

    But on propaganda to stiffen America’s resolve in 1942 nothing could compare with this film. And what incredible good fortune and timing favoured it (and its music):

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  19. “When wind turbine blades get old what’s next?”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68225891

    “…But working out what to do with the old turbines is challenging.

    Between 85 and 95% of a turbine’s materials, such as steel, aluminium, and copper, can be easily recycled, but the blades are a different matter.

    Made of fibreglass they are covered with a tough epoxy resin, designed to withstand years of hammering by the elements.

    These durable qualities make breaking down the blades for recycling a tricky process.

    Traditional solutions include using pieces of decommissioned blades in cement kilns to manufacture cement, though this can be an energy intensive process.

    Blades are also commonly disposed of in landfill sites, but this option is becoming increasingly less feasible with a number of countries, notably Germany and the Netherlands, banning the practice.

    Innovative solutions such as repurposing blades into playgrounds or bike sheds have been shown to be effective at a local level but, with some experts predicting up to 43 million tonnes of wind turbine blade waste by 2050, there is a pressing need for a system that will work on a bigger scale.

    Scientists and start-ups are working on the problem, with many focusing on tackling the challenge of breaking down the materials used in the blades….”

    Working on the problem, eh? At least they recognise that it’s a problem. Maybe, though, they should have put the horse before the cart, rather than the other way around.

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