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Comment by ralph84 | Hacker News Reader

Lots of commenters ITT who have obviously never actually been to the California desert. Paving the California desert with solar panels would be no less of an environmental tragedy than the clear cutting of the giant redwoods or the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

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Can you explain why? I can see how it would be undesirable to locals, but clear cutting redwoods would release massive amounts of stored carbon, whereas solar panels in the desert would seem to do the opposite.

The desert isn't a blank sandscape. There's a whole ecosystem of desert plants and creatures, not to mention the solar panels killing migratory birds.

This gets to a conflict of values between different environmentalists - a lot of people are willing to accept local environmental damage in order to counter climate change.

The people willing to accept “local” environmental change are not local, are they? Let’s be honest, coastal liberals want to build solar in the desert so they can charge their Teslas with a clear conscience. The people actually living there resent this. It’s the same dynamic that’s been playing out for over a century between urban and rural CA as regards water.

At the end of the day someone gets the powerplant in their backyard.

And the defining characteristic of that decision is the social status of the location.

Plenty of coastal wind farms going up. You put solar farms in the desert because that's where they make sense: minimal environmental impact compared to anywhere else they could go, and lots of uninterrupted sunlight.

Are all those creatures helped by climate change? What about the environmental devastation caused by coal mining and fossil fuel burning? Just putting up a bunch of panels is a lot lighter on the ecology of the area.

I'm not saying it wouldn't have any impact at all; just not sure about my parent's comment that it would be "no less of an environmental tragedy" than clear-cutting old growth forest.

California deserts arent sand dune heavy. Instead it is shrubs with their own ecosystem.

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