According to Meyl, the air between the coils is an "air capacitor".
All I can say is people who think there is only small amounts of energy transferred over very short distances must be trying to measure it the wrong way. It requires some kind of resonant device to gather the energy, otherwise no energy is transferred. It's there in the longitudinal waves that travel through the air along the earth.
http://amasci.com/tesla/tmistk.html
Look at figure 9