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.
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.
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.
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.
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.