Comment by underlipton

>Traditionally, deserts have been seen as harsh, lifeless landscapes

This is incorrect, depending on the geographic location. Many "deserts" are actually ecologically vibrant, and "greening" them (especially for farming) threatens to destroy a measure of natural diversity.

That said, I think you and the other poster placed emphasis on the wrong part of my post, as my point was less about solar land area coverage as some sort of singular evil, and more about the *opportunity* present in continuing to develop solar technologies so that they impact the environments they're placed in less and less over time. This would mean that efficiency is not the be-all-end-all of development, and that further improvements are possible even after reaching a satisfactory level of efficient generation. The energy economy would not fall off a cliff, as some predict. It would simply shift to solving other problems.

You can see an example of this in computer engineering, with Moore's Law's fall-off and the rise of GPU-based innovation.