Memes. Streams. Feeds. Cat videos. AND dog videos. Star Wars Kid. The Techno Viking. Shopping. Communication. All the information in the world, ready, when you need it. The internet is a magical place. But there are also some weird corners... And I'm not talking about your
parents' Facebook page. I'm talking about the dark underbelly. The ugly face of conspiracy theories and misinformation that shows itself in obscure forums and chat groups. But also in our comment section. Especially under stories about renewables. We've been seeing some pretty weird takes on wind and solar. So we asked ourselves: Why does this stuff keep floating around the internet? And where does it come from? Here's what we did. We read the thousands of comments posted under our videos on wind and solar – and collected those that smelled of misinformation. Some were pretty vague. Some pretty left-field. But some did make an argument. Some also pointed us to other places. So we went deeper into the anti-renewables bubble. "The big renewables lie!" "This is a crackpot fantasy/distortion." And slowly, patterns emerged. The same talking points kept coming up. And as futile as it may be, we decided to debunk them. We asked three energy experts for help. Auke Hoekstra of Eindhoven University of Technology. Paulina Jaramillo of Carnegie Mellon University. And Mark Jacobson of Stanford University. So this started out as a straightforward fact-check. But it led us into a world of shady lobby groups and secret money streams. We'll get to that. Let's start with the one claim we saw over and over again. People kept pointing out that making wind turbines and solar panels creates emissions because it needs energy. "The whole thing is built using fossil fuel infrastructure." "All these materials have to be mined, refined and/or manufactured in order to make solar panels." "...requires massive amounts of conventional energy." And yes... that actually applies to every form of energy generation. But some spelled out what others just insinuated. That renewables are worse for the climate than fossil fuels. "The fumes coming up to make these massive windmills is more than anything we're talking about with natural gas." "No, no, no. No, no!" "That's just... like, just not true. If you look at all of the lifecycle studies on the different power generation technologies, wind and solar, even when you account for the mining of materials and the production, it's just not even close." "For wind and solar, I think for wind you are now at 20 grams per kilowatt hour that you emit. And for solar, I think on average it's like 40 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour and that's a fraction like 1/10 or 1/20 of what you get with fossil fuels." Of course wind and solar have a carbon footprint. But it's tremendously lower than that of any fossil fuel. Oh, and this next rumor, by the way, is also not true. "A wind farm spends the first seven, eight years of its life earning back the energy that went into building the wind turbine." "It's such nonsense. It's such utter nonsense. I mean, for windmills, it takes like half a year nowadays for the windmill to produce as much energy as it took for the whole thing to be produced and put in place." So with this one out of the way, on to the next one. A classic on the renewables-bashing hitlist. "The essential unreliability of solar and wind." "Solar and wind are unreliable fuels." "We can't rely on renewables alone." The message here is that solar and wind will plunge us into chaos. "This isn't exactly a newsflash. But the sun doesn't shine all the time. And the wind doesn't blow all the time." And those peddling this myth got very excited in early 2021. "Record snowfall in parts of Texas." "Deadly winter storm blanketed most of that state with snow and ice." "...more than 2 million people in Texas without power." Winter storms swept across the US state of Texas, leading to severe power outages that killed hundreds of people. And the anti-renewables propaganda machine immediately found a culprit. "The windmills froze so the powergrid failed." Even the state's governor, who's received millions of dollars in campaign funding from the oil and gas industry, blamed renewables. "Our wind and our solar got shut down – and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power. It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas." This picture started spreading online. And along with it, the narrative that frozen wind turbines caused the blackout. But they didn't. The photo was actually taken in Sweden - and first published in 2015. And frozen wind turbines were really not the biggest problem in Texas. "It was basically, as you say that in non-polite English, it was basically a clusterf**k." "Nuclear went down, coal went down, natural gas went down. And a portion of the wind turbines went down... simultaneously." A report by the University of Texas, which came
out in the catastrophe's aftermath, showed what the biggest problem was. Outages in fossil fuel power plants, especially those running on natural gas. Yes, some wind turbines also stopped working. But that could have been prevented. "There are wind turbines in many states in the US and in Northern Europe that don't freeze because they actually have de-icing equipment on them. So the problem was not intrinsically with the wind turbines, but with the fact that there was no de-icing equipment." What happened in Texas was not the fault of renewables. But that's exactly what countless people were told – and believed. And the big problem is... they probably still do. "The online world is like a kind of cooking pot. There are things that have been in that cooking pot for quite a long while. There are new ingredients being added in. Every time it gets added in, it gets stirred up." This is Neil Johnson, who researches online misinformation. What you see in the background is a map of how it spreads throughout the internet. "At any one time in any place in this network can appear any kind of combination of pre-existing ideas which will never go away, you can't eradicate them." Racism, covid conspiracies, climate change denial. They all spread in the same way, between similar online communities, across all kinds of platforms. "It's like a parallel universe to the establishment, best science, guidance discussion. Which unfortunately, I have to say, it's not shown here. But if I did show it, it would be a kind of tiny blob in the corner talking to each other, massively, with fantastic science. But talking to each other." The sheer size of this network is scary. And what makes it even scarier is that it's not only members of the tin foil hat brigade. "There's a kind of background glue which is not these extreme people who spend their whole life worrying about this. It's the rest of us. It's parents. It's people who are concerned about their kids' future. People who are concerned about their local neighborhood, etc., who are going out and looking for information and kind of like they're taking ownership of the decision of whether a particular piece of science is correct or not." Our brain plays its part in this as well. It favors information we get from people we trust or admire. And information that supports our worldview. Change can be intimidating. And it's also not always easy to separate fact from fake. Much of the misinformation out there does contain a grain of truth – that then gets blown out of proportion. Yes, solar panels do have a carbon footprint. But it's tiny compared to that of fossil fuels. Yes, some wind turbines did freeze in Texas. But that wasn't the main reason for the blackout by a long shot. Context matters. Also for this die-hard myth about wind turbines. "They're terrible for birds." "...kills all the birds..." Again, it's true that wind turbines kill some birds. But cars kill significantly more. And so do skyscrapers. And even cats. And while we're on cats, let's just look at a few more because I really need a break. [sighs] Debunking is a hard and thankless job. The list of falsehoods about renewables
circulating online is pretty much endless. We could keep telling you what's wrong with them, one by one, forever. And I guess that's what the people
behind them want us to do. They want to keep us busy and distracted
from asking way, way more interesting questions. Like... who's peddling these myths in the first place? "It's kind of hard to pinpoint it. I think it's a lot of think tanks, right-leaning think tanks." In the US there's a bunch of them, with names like The Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow or Institute for Energy Research. They publish "reports" and "articles" that somehow
always seem to find that renewables are horrible. And they post anti-renewable propaganda on social media. "These machines kill a lot of birds." "Unreliable energy infrastructure." "... which FAILED Texas." Not to mention many of them straight up deny
climate change or at least downplay it. They get most of their funding
through donations and grants. And wouldn't it just be interesting to know from whom? "Usually the most interesting think tanks don't mention where they get their money from. So it's basically a lot of guesswork." Sometimes we do get the odd glimpse into their finances. In the past, many of them received money from Exxon Mobil, according to the fossil fuel giant's donation reports. But usually, most of this
plays out behind closed doors. The think tanks operate as non-profit charities – which allows them to keep secret who their sugar daddies are. We do know, though, through tax files, that many receive substantial funding from The Donors Trust. This organization has been described as the "dark-money ATM" of the conservative movement in the US. It distributes more than 100 million dollars a year
to right-leaning politicians and institutions. But they're also a non-profit charity... so there's no way of knowing who's funding them. But even if it' s hard to name names, it's easy to see who profits from the disinformation. "Usually the supporters of the status quo and people who either have a financial interest or have just an ideological opposition to renewable energy." Quite frankly, it's been frustrating and disheartening to see all these outlandish claims about wind and solar still out there. I guess it's important to take them for what they are – a symptom. A symptom of a trillion-dollar industry
clinging onto its business model. Doubts about the alternatives and fear of
change are helping it keep its grip. "This has been a real trip down the rabbit hole. Have you ever come across misinformation – online or from family and friends? How do you deal with it? Let us know in the comments. And don't forget to hit subscribe because we have a new video coming out for you every Friday."
