Agreed, wind & solar are only marginal sources, and no technology we can see will make them good enough for a whole economy.
As it happens I like the way wind farms look, and you have to be pretty close to hear much noise. Sadly they are big consumers of oil, and dangerous to workers on them.
I'n not quite sure how dams and barriers can be seen as good for the environment, though you could argue that sometimes they are less bad than other sources.
We can of course reduce our energy consumption, but we have to be realistic about this. Slagging SUVs is good fun and keeps young greens happy and occupied, but are a tiny % of energy consumption.
Industry tries quite hard to reduce consumption mostly of course because it costs them money, so I'm sceptical that big reductions are to be found there. A few % either way makes little difference.
New homes are vastly more energy efficient, I specified that the new shed/play castle be built to same standards as a new house. This means 3 inch thick insulation everywhere, including the floor.
The EU tries desparately to keep energy saving bulbs more expensive to "protect european jobs", but they are failing, and their cost has come down a lot.
Better boilers are a useful reduction, but we're talking 10-20%, which is not going to change the world.
To subsist long term on non-nuclear/carbon sources we're talking about something like an 80% reduction on total consumption. No plausible energy saving programme is going to get us there.
But it is owrth doing. Building these reactors will take decades, and it's pretty inevitable that we'll have at least one disaster on that path.
But all forms of energy are bad things. An energy source that looks "green" and "safe" when you see some nice brochure from the greens or the lobby of the manufacturer becomes really horrid when you scale it up to deal with millions of people.