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.
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.
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.