To put things into perspective:
"Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy"
Wow, 2 red herrings in the same sentence. I wonder why you brought that up, other than attempting to live up to the thread's subject line.
1. Nobody claims that Wind turbines are clean,
2. Nobody claims it is or will, ever be able to, provide global energy (to fully replace other sources).
The author of the article that you linked to, Matt Ridley, is a
known lobbyist for the Coal industry (he also admit a vested interest in your article link), heck he even allows the UK Government to do open-cast Coalmining on his family's Blagdon estate in Northumberland ...
As usual, this article by him uses a mix of truths and a lot of fallacies. That would be fine if meant to be entertaining, but not when intended to sow doubt in Government (who occasionally worry more about getting re-elected than about building a better future).
Wind energy is one of the several sources of 'renewable' energy, and building the installations will involve some one-time polluting manufacturing (steel/concrete/fiberglass/quarrying of magnetic materials) effort (and create job opportunities and build expertise). As more installations are added to the total energy production capacity, the percentage of renewable energy in the total requirements will increase (10-15% is an already reasonable possibility,
Germany produced 34% in 2016). What we are currently experiencing in my country, is that we're basically passing the point where subsidies are needed to create momentum. Experience/expertise, skill, and improving materials make that possible.
Also, besides energy saving efforts, with each kWh generated by renewable sources (an overview of the growing Dutch production capacity can be followed
here, real-time), we can reduce the production by our remaining otherwise continuously polluting Coal and Natural Gas power plants, and at the same time reduce our energy dependency on other countries, like Russia or Saudi Arabia et al. We are already reducing our own Natural Gas production volumes (also to reduce earthquakes). A company like Google has, in advance, purchased 10-years production capacity worth of energy for their Datacenter in the Netherlands, completely supplied by a wind farm (the location of farms near the sea-coast helps to provide a more steady supply of the wind than possible with land-based wind farms).
Cheers,
Bart