Truly a silly article. Eveyrone knows the negatives of coal. For the article to have been informative, it should have discussed the negative aspects of wind.
I don't have time to go into it in detail, but the primary problems are intermittency, critical materials usage, and land usage.
Intermittent electrical sources cannot supply the electrical grid, and batteries are way too expensive. So once you get more than 15% to 20% of your capacity in wind (or solar), you need to start spending additional money for backup generating capability - reliable ("firm") sources. That drives prices way up.
As for critical materials - there are large amounts of rare earths and other expensive metals in wind turbines. These do not appear from fairy dust, they have to be mined. That mining takes a lot of energy, today all produced from fossile fuels, and it produces a lot of hazardous waste. Of course, western environmentalists don't notice that, because the mining and refining takes place overseas, in places without environmental laws. And, a lot of it involves slavery or other terrible working conditions.
That production releases CO2, mercury, sulfur, and plenty of radiation.
And then there's land usage. Only with the modern religious environmental movement would we allow the replacement of vast amounts of open prairie, scenic ridge lines, and ocean vistas with giant wind turbine, each one the height of a high rise building, a construction vast amounts of concrete (produced in a CO2 intensive process), vasts amounts of steel (produced by burning and reacting with coke -a form of coal), and vast amounts of plastic (from oil).
Each of these monstrosities has a road and a power line to ite, leaving the landscape criscrossed with both. And, of course, these too are produced using fossil fuels, and the roads kick up - yep - dirt which has trace radioactivity in it (along with various disesae causing organisms).
If you don't believe me, join me in my annual trek to the US midwest, where the night sky blinks red from the anticollision lights on the wind towers, the dirt roads kick up dust from the service vehicles, and the bats and birds are slaughtered as they migrate through these giant blenders.
And when the wind doesn't blow, they just sit their, limp, ugly testaments to the folly of modern environmental extremism.
So much for the "zeroes" im this stilly article.
As it stands, it is basically a mislead exersie in sophistry. If you want to replace coal plants, start with combined cycle natural gas turbine plants, which are responsible for the dramatic reduction in US CO2 emissions, and use those while building nuclear plants. The latter take dramaticallyh less material and space than the windmills, produce very little pollution, are extremely reliable, and are very safe.
