Liberal politicians have made the effects of California's drought worse by refusing to build more reservoirs to help during the lean years, GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina said Sunday.
Asked by "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd if she agreed that climate change has exacerbated the drought, Fiorina shot back that liberal politicians for 40 years refused to allow new reservoirs and water conveyance systems as the state's population doubled.
"So 70 percent of the rainfall has washed out to sea," she said. "That's pretty dumb if you know you have droughts every single year, or every three years, lets say."
One of the liberal politicians Fiorina was referencing, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, called Fiorina's position, "utter ignorance."
"Building a dam won't do a damn thing about fires or climate change or the absence of moisture in the ground and vegetation in California," he told Todd. "I think these people if they want to run for president better do kind of eighth grade science before they make any more utterances."
Fiorina said she heard a lot of insults in Brown's words, but not much sense.
"It would be helpful if you were fighting fires to have more water," she said. "Firefighters in California have difficulty getting enough water now, so they're using other means. It would be helpful to agriculture and everything else to have water saved in the good years so that you could use it in the bad years."
Fiorina said she doesn't deny there is a drought, but that politicians have made the problem "immeasurably worse."
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