Possible Republican presidential candidate and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said that environmentalists were to blame for California’s “man-made” drought, the Huffington Post reported.
“With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,” Fiorina said on Glenn Beck’s radio show yesterday. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”
Because of the severity of the drought, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) ordered a 25 percent reduction in water consumption for everyone except the state’s agriculture industry, which accounts for 80 percent of the state’s entire water consumption.
Fiorina said the lack of reservoir construction was a “classic case of liberals willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology. It is a tragedy.”
But, according to the Sierra Club, the dams and reservoirs wouldn’t likely have been able to stop the effects of the drought.
“For more than 100 years, environmentalists have failed to stop the damming of nearly every significant river in California. And yet all of the hundreds of dams out there have done nothing to produce rain or snow pack over the last four years,” director of the Sierra Club’s California chapter Kathryn Phillips told HuffPo.
“That’s because you can’t store what’s not there. We simply don’t have rain or snow pack and are suffering the worst California drought since water agencies and weather trackers started keeping records.”
Phillips said that what California is experiencing is exactly what scientists have been predicting: “Weather and precipitation would become less predictable and droughts would become frequent and more severe.”
NextGen Climate released a statement last night calling Fiorina’s comments “irrational.”
“For a science denier to opine that Democrats caused the drought in California is about as irrational as believing someone who failed at running a business in California and then failed as a candidate for office in California has any cause to be running for the highest office in the land,” said NextGen spokesman Bobby Whithorne in the statement.
Given that the rest of the GOP is completely ignorant and uninformed when it comes to climate science, Fiorina’s comments shouldn’t come as that big of a shock. She is simply following party orders and turning this into yet another partisan issue.
