BRUSSELS — The U.S. president says wind power is for stupid people. Some in Europe agree.
Social media campaigns claiming wind power is causing cancer and poisoning drinking water are surging across Europe, spreading American-style distrust of renewables to a side of the Atlantic traditionally in favor of clean energy.
Sweden and other Nordic countries in particular are hotbeds of anti-wind disinformation, according to a new report commissioned by Europe’s wind lobby, which warns false claims about renewables are slowing projects the EU needs for energy security.
“If mis- and disinformation stand in the way, I think we have a serious problem,” WindEurope spokesperson Christoph Zipf told POLITICO. “It’s not about the wind industry per se. It’s about making sure that we have energy that is not stuck in the Strait of Hormuz, but actually produced here in Europe.”
An ecosystem of activists, politicians, fringe media and online communities are spreading claims that wind turbines trigger blackouts, kill wildlife, cause cancer and poison drinking water, the report, produced by the U.K.-based research firm CASM Technology, found.
The claims were spread across more than 500 accounts on six social media platforms, producing tens of thousands of anti-wind posts over the last two years.
Swedish accounts generated the highest volume of anti-wind posts, according to the report, followed by France, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom and Germany. While researchers cautioned the country ranking was partly shaped by sampling and data-access limits, they said the Nordics clearly emerged as a major center of anti-wind activity.
The findings land at a critical moment for Europe. As the war in Iran exposes Europe’s vulnerability to fossil fuel shocks and supply disruptions, the EU is pushing electrification and renewables harder than ever to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.
They also come as U.S. President Donald Trump ramps up his war on wind energy, which he has called “big ugly windmills,” the “scam of the century,” and an energy source for “stupid people.” His government is blocking new projects and spending billions in federal funds to cancel projects already in development.
Getting specific
The report argues online narratives are increasingly turning into a real-world obstacle for projects.
“For me, one of the big, interesting areas … was the disinformation targeting not just companies, but specific projects. And not just a state, but an industry,” CASM founder Carl Miller told POLITICO. “What’s interesting is how geographically specific the narratives are,” he added. “In some countries they’ll just talk about economic viability. In others, ecological impacts. In others, elites.”
In Sweden, Finland and the U.K., anti-wind narratives around electricity prices, grid instability and blackouts attracted strong engagement. In Norway and Italy, environmental-destruction narratives were more prominent.
Researchers say the campaigns increasingly function as a kind of shadow permitting system, manufacturing local opposition that can translate into appeals, delays and political pressure against projects.
That matters especially in Nordic countries such as Sweden and Norway, where municipalities often have the power to block wind projects.
Brussels is trying to speed up approvals through its grids package, which is meant to modernize and expand Europe’s electricity networks, shorten permitting timelines for grid and renewable projects, and make it easier to connect new wind and solar capacity to the power system.
The study describes how narratives spread across borders online, including MAGA-style messaging around “economic elites” and globalist agendas being repurposed in European energy debates. “One of the things the internet has allowed is a really messy intertwining of political cultures,” Miller said. “They live in the same spaces online. They talk about the same things.”
The report stops short of directly attributing the campaigns foreign actors such as Russia or the U.S., but researchers pointed to a wider online ecosystem in which anti-renewable narratives overlap with anti-vaccine rhetoric, anti-EU sentiment and far-right political messaging.
“Russia uses energy dependence as a geopolitical tool,” Miller said. “It’s a massive exporter of fossil fuels and of nuclear. It does not want to see an energy sovereign Europe that is building up its renewables capability.”
WindEurope says the impact is already being felt on the ground. The report documents cases of delayed or canceled projects worth billions of euros, alongside growing resistance campaigns and legal appeals. “Mis- and disinformation leads to delays in projects because we see resistance. We see appeals against wind energy projects,” Zipf said.
Nikola Gazdov, director of Bulgarian renewables company Element Power, described Bulgaria as a warning of how disinformation can harden into political paralysis. “Bulgaria has not built a single new wind farm in twelve years,” he wrote following a panel discussion on the report.
Researchers warn the next battleground may already be emerging inside artificial intelligence systems. In a preliminary study, CASM found anti-wind websites were being cited prominently by major large language models when answering questions about wind energy.
“I think it’s the new frontier,” Miller said. “As we now transition into a world which will increasingly be interpreted, understood and filtered by LLMs, I think it is completely inevitable that how bad actors do information warfare or information operations is also going to change.”
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