Electricity pollutes as well

While some electricity is produced via wind, solar or hydroelectic power, the overwhelming majority of it is produced by COAL BURNING power plants.
My father-in-law is in the utility business and stuff like this scares him as well. The more demand there is for electricity, the more the demand there will be for coal to generate the electricity. If the ability to burn coal was suddenly brought to a halt, how would the power companies generate enough electricity?
According to my father-in-law just about every potential source for hydro-electric generated power has been damed and utilized. Nuclear power was killed by the @#$%&. If the @#$%& think coal smoke is bad, they should drive through the fields of windmills that generate power from wind, what an eyesore.
So while electicity itself is a "clean" energy, it requires "pollution" to generate it.
My uncle is a chemist for a refinery and he is much more worried about what they put in gasoline to replace lead, which he said needed to be replaced, but in talking to him, diesel and gas are just as bad if not worse due to the "aromatics," whatever those are, that are added to those fuels. Unc says that while the coal soot is a pollutant, it will settle quickly out of the air and while it is a nuisance if lands on something of yours, it is essentially a naturally occuring substance as opposed to some other stuff that we put in the air and think nothing of.