Carly Fiorina blames liberal environmentalists for California water crisis

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina is blaming California’s water crisis on “liberal environmentalists” who are “willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”

“With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,” Ms. Fiorina said in an interview Monday on Glenn Beck’s radio show, The Blaze reported. “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.”

Ms. Fiorina said that as a result, 70 percent of California’s rainfall “washes out to sea” every year, The Blaze reported.

“California is a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology. It is a tragedy,” Ms. Fiorina said.

“Government has grown so huge, so powerful, so costly, so complex, it is literally crushing the life out of this country,” she argued. “It is crushing small and family-owned businesses, which are the economic engine of our nation. It is crushing possibilities out of people’s lives by entangling them in a web of dependence from which they cannot escape. The weight, the cost and the power of government are literally crushing the potential of the nation.

“We must, absolutely must, get government under control, which means reducing its size and its power and its complexity in really fundamental ways,” Ms. Fiorina said, The Blaze reported. “And that is why I am seriously considering running for president, and will make a final decision over the next month or so. I have come to the point of view that too many politicians have been captured in this system for too long, and they no longer see what needs to be done.”

California Gov. Jerry Brown announced a crackdown last week on residents and businesses in an effort to reduce overall water usage by 25 percent over the next nine months. The order doesn’t include the agriculture industry, which accounts for roughly 80 percent of all human water use, the Wall Street Journal reported.