People have considered it. There are two reasons that you can summarize this as “it doesn’t matter”: 1- wind and solar (and hydro) are so much better than coal

People have considered it. There are two reasons that you can summarize this as “it doesn’t matter”: 1- wind and solar (and hydro) are so much better than coal when it comes global warming and other negative environmental impact, the main reason to bring up “concerns” is entrenched economic interests, and not real fears of increased warming. The fact is that renewable sources are net cooling - and not by a little - compared to the warming we’re already causing with coal burning and CO2 emissions. 2- The scale of the earth’s atmosphere and surface area are “very large” compared to our solar and wind farms. So large that it might seem funny at first to think turbines or solar cells would have any effect. One way to think about turbines is that they’re somewhat comparable to trees, and we’ve lost many times more trees in the last 50 years than we’ve added turbines. Another way is to compare the height of a turbine (say, 100 meters) to the height of the wind (maybe 400 km, depending how you measure), so the turbines touch maybe 1/4000 of the vertical air, and across the world cover very little of the total land area, meaning the total volume of air impacted by turbines is ‘tiny’. According to my internet searches just now, the earth’s land surface (1.5e14 m^2) gets, on average, 2.4e16 watts of solar power. [1] The total solar power production today is just less than 800GW, or 8e11 watts. [2] So solar might be capturing one thirty-thousandth of the surface energy, or 0.003%. (And that actually seems surprisingly large to me, it’s possible I’m missing more orders of magnitude somewhere. I don’t think solar farms are covering anywhere near as much as 0.003% of the surface of the earth.) Atmospheric energy is about half of the surface energy, and wind is currently capturing roughly the same as solar [3], so maybe we could estimate it about 0.006% of the wind energy. [1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/EnergyBalance https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/EnergyBalance [2] https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2021/ https://iea-pvps.org/snapshot-reports/snapshot-2021/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country