destroy the ecosystem of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean and Black seas and create thousands of square miles of unusable salt flats

For what purpose. We should be diverting water from the oceans into the Sahara and creating giant seas, turning it into a landscape that is ALMOST livable for people, to thereafter justify the population needed to man the European Solar Power Grid built there. We could power the entirety of Europe with a few hundred square miles of Saharan solar panels, but the land is just too unlivable for it to be cost effective… unless we get some plants and water there.