Fiorina: California Drought an Environmentalist-Made Disaster

Carly Fiorina, who has said that she is more than 90% likely to seek the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, nailed the ideology of the greens as the cause of the California drought in an interview with Glenn Beck’s The Blaze on Monday.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO told The Blaze radio program,

“With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided. 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.”

Fiorina said that as a result, 70% of California’s rainfall washes unused out to sea, year after year.

“It is a man-made disaster,” she said. “California is a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other peoples’ lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology. It is a tragedy.

“In California, fish and frogs and flies are really important—far more important, apparently, than the 40% unemployment rate in certain parts of central valley,” Fiorina said. “So the Senate and the president could waive some of those water restrictions. They have been asked to do so, and they have refused to do so.”

But rather than providing a scientific solution, including reviving the nation’s policies of Great Projects for the Common Good, Fiorina echoed the libertarian mantra: “We must, absolutely must, get government under control, which means reducing its size and its power and its complexity in really fundamental ways…. The weight, the cost and the power of government are literally crushing the potential of the nation.”