2 ms·

You haven't followed the recent Bears Ears controversy, have you? :-)

• xyzzyz 8y ago
  Not really, though I imagine you'd be able to find 2% of Utah that nobody will care about in particular. I love Utah as much as anyone, especially in winter, but I wouldn't want all of the US look exactly like Utah -- and the whole US is about as large as Sahara is.
• krupan 8y ago
  Here's another example. I grew up in Washington state. We have dams on a lot of rivers in the Northwest generating clean renewable energy before anyone had ever heard of climate change (Grand Coulee is the most famous). They literally did change the barren desert of Eastern Washington into a fertile farming breadbasket with the irrigation water and power they provide. Despite that, there are people who hate them because they changed the rivers into a series of lakes and are threatening the wild salmon population. Pick any part of the Sahara and transform it and some species unique to that area, some native people, some curious weather pattern, some unique geologic formation will be lost and people will be upset.
  • xyzzyz 8y ago
    I'm quite familiar with the dams, I live in Washington myself, and visited them multiple times. I agree that someone will always be upset, but this is generally true about every change ever. The point is to do changes that are most beneficial to the most, don't carry extremely serious side effects, and are net win over the alternative, which in this case is keeping burning coal. There's still plenty of coal left in Roslyn fields, and if not for the dams, it would probably continue to be extracted today.
    • jessaustin 8y ago
      Surely that coal is as big an argument for Saharan solar farms as it is for Washington dams?