One thing to always keep in mind is how much money there is supporting certain viewpoints. It’s not that people are combining up with things at random but that they’re hearing stuff recirculated from the same sources. Anything to do with fuel economy or power sources gets the double whammy from people who are hesitant about change or self-identify with a technology (think about the car enthusiasts who said EVs would never be fun before Teslas started smoking them), as well as a very well funded media network serving both political ends and the interests of a very rich industry. That keeps ideas circulating and the more people hear it, the more they might start to think there’s something to it.

One interesting example of how weird this can get was in the mid-2000s when various places started circulating hit pieces on Rachel Carson claiming that banning DDT had killed millions of people by letting malaria spread. This was scientifically nonsense (resistance evolves rapidly & was a major problem by the late 1950s) but it circulated enough to get mainstream coverage, especially as various right-wing outlets (Reason, Cato, CEI, Fox, etc.) started pushing it as justification for ignoring climate change. For a period, a fair number of people felt it reasonable to ask whether it might in fact have been better to allow unrestricted DDT use even though they had none of the political or financial ties motivating the original spreaders, simply because it was successfully introduced as a topic people should have an opinion on.

The campaign traced back to tobacco company lobbyists who were trying to discredit the WHO in Africa so their anti-smoking campaigns would be less effective:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080517020543/http://www.prospe...