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In August 2015, a meme posted to the Google+ group The Secret Society of Anti-AGW-ACC Cultism, an organization that claims climate change is a hoax, reproduced the words allegedly written by Thomas Homer-Dixon, the Associate Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, on the subject of windmills. As his statements were presented in that meme, Homer-Dixon appeared to have asserted that windmills never produce as much energy as is expended in building them: The quotations selectively employed in the meme were taken from Homer-Dixon's 2009 book Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives). However, this quotation, which comes from an essay written by earth scientist David Hughes, was cherry-picked and presented out of context to create a deliberately misleading version of what the author actually said. Hughes did write that some windmills might not recoup their energy-construction costs, but he didn't assert, as the meme implied, that no windmills will ever generate as much energy as was invested in building them. In fact, he allowed that a windmill situated at a good location could pay back the energy costs of creating it in under three years, but that aspect was omitted from the memed version of his quote: As Hughes observed, his point was that the concept of net energy is crucial if we want to find a policy that will see us through the Energy Sustainability Dilemma, not that windmills should be eschewed for using up more energy than they ever create. Homer-Dixon did not write this viral quote, but he did comment on it in a May 2018 blog post entitled: No . . . I did not say wind energy is ‘Idiot Power.’
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