Aside from obvious habitat destruction brought about by wind and solar farms, there are other, unforeseen impacts on the environment from "green" energy. For example, wind mills have killed 2.9 billion birds since the 1960's and, according to the Audubon Society, it would be nigh impossible to train windmills to be bird save as every bird approaches windmills differently. Solar panels are made with cancer-causing materials such as lead and cadmium that tend to be washed out by rain, leading them to enter the soil. According to an article by Forbes' Michael Shellenberger published in 2018, the German Stuttgart Institute for Photovoltaics predicts that waste produced by solar panels will become and environmental disaster within the next 20 or 30 years. The battery used by electric cars are also problematic, requiring that lithium and other metals be mined from the Earth. The ideal solutions for green energy would be in the form of Thorium fission since it produces little waste, cannot be enriched into weapons-grade fissile material, and generates much more energy than coal and uranium combined, but also is more abundant than uranium and is only dangerous when exposed to a catalyst that it can be easily drained away from in case of a meltdown. Likewise, hydrogen combustion should replace petroleum combustion. A pure hydrogen-oxygen combustion only produces water (2H2+O2->2H2O). Hydrogen is also the most abundant element in the universe. The only downsides are a lack of infrastructure and the issue of proper containment, as hydrogen is highly flammable.
Be the first to reply to this answer.