Where have you been, Ms. Fiorina?

By Jennifer Clary, California Waters Program Manager In an April 7 blog post for Time Magazine, Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard and former candidate for California governor, made the wildly inaccurate claim that “overzealous liberal environmentalists” are responsible for California’s drought. Ms. Fiorina airs out the tired old myths propagated by the thankfully dwindling water buffaloes of the state -

Environmental policies are sending water to the ocean that should be used to support farms and farmers; no new storage has been built in half a century; this is a "man-made" drought.

Here’s the big news flash for Ms. Fiorina: we don’t have water because we haven’t had anything like normal rainfall in 4 years; tree ring data shows this is California’s worst drought in 13,000 years. Is it man-made? Well, maybe we have some agreement there. We do think that climate change is exacerbating the current drought. But, even if it’s not responsible for the lack of rain and snowfall, temperatures in the past four years have been the warmest on record, meaning we have more evaporation, more heat waves and greater potential for catastrophic forest fires. Ms. Fiorina – you say no storage has been built in the past 50 years? Balderdash. More than 5.6 million acre-feet of new storage has been built since the last drought ended in 1992. Have we built major new dams in the Central Valley? Well, it’s a bit difficult to do that, since the state and federal projects have dammed every major river in California; there isn’t a lot of space left for new surface storage and not a lot of water to put in those reservoirs if they are built. The Fresno Bee – not known as a bastion of leftist media – analyzed the water supply impact of all of the surface storage projects proposed for the state last summer. Guess what – build them all, and we’re still in the same situation today. Here’s the moral of the story. We depend upon nature for our water supply. While we have constructed a lot of dams, and pump a lot of groundwater, to ensure a steady supply each year, we can’t build our way out of every drought. When the rains don’t come for years on end, we have to reduce our water usage, and share what’s left – with families, farmers and fish – so we can all make it through the drought as best we can.