Fear-based lies about clean energy make Americans poorer and sicker

By Greg Alvarez

During my six years in the wind power industry, I often heard fear-based lies about proposed wind farms that defied common sense—wind turbines would cause nails to pop out of walls, turn cows’ milk sour, or decimate deer populations because bucks would catch their antlers in spinning turbine blades. On that last one, never mind that wind turbine blades are a couple hundred feet off the ground.

It’s no surprise that none of these outlandish lies ever happened once American workers built the projects and communities were reinvesting revenue from those turbines back into their schools, roads, and emergency services. In fact, most of the people I met had overwhelmingly positive feelings about the clean energy projects in their community.

There’s no denying clean energy projects bring change to communities often accustomed to the status quo. But wild renewable energy rumors spread by the fossil fuel industry seem to run rampant across social media and internet forums. This disinformation is slowing the clean energy transition, imperiling efforts to fight climate change, and worsening public health.

Today, wind and solar are the cheapest forms of new electricity. Contrary to popular belief, it’s cheaper to build new renewables than continue running many fossil fuel plants currently on the grid—for example, 99 percent of U.S. coal plants are uneconomic compared to replacing them with new local solar and wind.

Misinformation is taking a particular toll on offshore wind growth, “where we see the highest correlation between misinformation and opposition,” said Matthew Eisenson of the Sabin Center, at Columbia University. “There has been a concerted misinformation campaign to tie whale beachings to offshore wind development and exploration.” In reality, however, scientists find ship strikes and entanglements with fishing gear are behind the recent rise in East Coast whale deaths.

During my travels through wind country, I met dozens of people who told the economic success stories wind projects brought to their communities—with wind project revenue covering school budgets, lowering local taxes, and creating jobs that brought young people back to home, to places with otherwise rapidly aging populations. And clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are already spurring tens of thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in investment.

A generational economic opportunity is unfolding across America, and seeing communities lose out on investment dollars and good jobs because of misinformation often pushed by fossil fuel interests is frankly heartbreaking—and the costs are huge.

There’s the costs our bodies and our children’s bodies pay from breathing toxic air from burning fossil fuels. Misinformation may only affect a specific community where a clean energy project is proposed, but air pollution doesn’t respect geographic lines.

The more we learn about air pollution, the worse we realize it is for our health. Worldwide, 2,000 children a day die from air pollution, according to a new study from the Health Effects Institute, and air pollution is second only to malnutrition as a cause of deaths for children under five. Toxic air has also surpassed tobacco use globally to claim second place as the biggest risk factor for death, with high blood pressure presenting the worst risk. Fossil fuel power plants belch air pollution that can cause heart attacks, asthma attacks, strokes, and lost workdays.

We shouldn’t tolerate energy sources that cause so much suffering when cleaner, cheaper alternatives are ready to take their place.

We’re still learning how to inoculate against misinformation, but local and state governments can take several steps to stop its impact on the clean energy transition.
Misinformation hotbed Michigan offers an illustrative example, where a new law charges the Michigan Public Service Commission with permitting utility-scale wind, solar and,
storage projects. Alternatively, localities can adopt standards set at the state level when permitting projects.

These changes can help local officials charged with clean energy zoning decisions navigate processes they may know little about, and safeguard against misinformation pushed by ill-informed constituents or covert fossil fuel interests.

We know how to combat the climate crisis—build as much clean energy as fast as we can and electrify all the things that currently burn fossil fuels, like cars, furnaces, and hot water heaters. For a long time, the technology wasn’t mature enough or costs were too high, but we’ve broken down those barriers.

Clean energy can now fight climate change, invest millions of dollars in our communities, create good jobs, and help us breathe easier.

We’ve come so far on the engineering side only to run into a problem of the human psyche. We should never accept being made poorer and sicker because of misinformation-filled Facebook memes—there’s too much at stake.

Greg Alvarez is the Deputy Director of Communications at Energy Innovation (www.energyinnovation.org) where he executes campaigns that showcase the firm’s work in traditional and digital media. This guest column, edited for length, originally ran on the organization’s website. Alvarez has worked in climate and clean energy communications for nearly a decade, most recently at the American Wind Energy Association/American Clean Power. Association (AWEA/ACP).

Q4 2024