It depends entirely on what scope one considers for impact. Do we count maintenance roads? Total land area disturbed? Windmill foundation pads? Global co2 levels? Abandoned equipment in general? Noise levels over how much area?

What is ‘leftover’ from an abandoned well can be as simple as a buried 6” ground level plug, or as messy as an acre of abandoned equipment and a giant oil spill/hazmat area. Plus a billion tons of atmospheric co2 - which is invisible.

If you drive I5 in California through the Central Valley, you’ll see hundreds of active oil wells that have been active since the early 1900’s, mixed in with active orchards and farmlands. They are a bit hard to find. Like this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TiWATTxP1jWmu4Et7?g_st=com.google.ma...]. And this one [https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZSeCzys8W2q4ubeJ9?g_st=com.google.ma...].

What you won’t see is that even downtown Los Angeles has similar wells that still produce significant oil hidden in special buildings.

If you take a little detour, you can see the thousands of acres of windmills in Tehachapi that produce similar amounts of total energy. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/TBVn1JUbgqSYTduu5?g_st=com.google.ma...].

And if you keep driving, you can see the thousands of acres of solar farms that are doing similar. [https://maps.app.goo.gl/XGBtWZLppWH7vjqc8?g_st=com.google.ma...]

Oil is so widely used because it is incredibly cheap and easy to use at large scale, with minimal obviously visible consequence.

Because co2 is invisible. And as long as we don’t spill large quantities of it, it doesn’t seem to cause any visible problems.

The effect of the low density from wind, solar, etc. isn’t visible until you go to areas it is widely deployed and then do the math on how much energy they are actually producing, which is a small fraction of what would be produced if the same area was impacted to produce oil or nuclear.