“Climate denier!”
You need not actually “deny” the popular narrative about global warming to get maligned with that label. Simply asking questions is enough to get you in trouble with America's rabid liberal progressives.
If, for example, you're a member of Congress who dares to think for yourself rather than embrace the prevailing media narrative, you'll likely become a target of the Democrat party's billionaire financiers.
If you're a state or local government official, you'll contend with Obama administration staffers who are willing to compromise the safety of local communities for the sake of beating you into “climate submission.”
In this photo taken Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2014, a warning buoy sits on the dry, cracked bed of Lake Mendocino near Ukiah, Calif. Despite recent spot rains The reservoir is currently only about 37 percent full. California remans in the midst of an historic drought causing Gov. Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency.(AP/Rich Pedroncelli)
But if truth still matters in America, then it's time to take an honest look at the facts behind some recent statements made by one of America's most high profile women – former tech executive, former U.S. Senate candidate, and likely future presidential candidate Carly Fiorina.
In a recent interview with Glenn Beck, Fiorina described California's devastating drought as a “man-made disaster,” and noted that it is “a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology.”
This, of course, touched-off immediate criticism, while her comments were dismissed as merely political.
Yet if California is in fact being undermined by “environmentalists” - and more specifically, by environmental policy enforcers within our government - this should matter to every American. Because like it or not, California is a spectacular place in the world, as well as a global economic powerhouse. If it were its own country, it would comprise the eight largest economy in the world.
For the record, California is home to the highest mountain in the contiguous 48 states (Mount Whitney); the lowest valley (Death Valley); Facebook; “Surf City, U.S.A.”(Huntington Beach); Apple Computer; The World Champion San Francisco Giants; Charles Schwabb financial services; eBay; Mattel Toys; Mazda Motors of America; Disneyland; Cisco Systems; “the entertainment capitol of the world” (Hollywood); Mitsubishi Motors of North America; and three former U.S. presidents (Richard Nixon by birth, and Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan by “adoption”).
But California is also home to some of North America's most fertile agricultural land, a point that is often ignored. And it is in Central California's agricultural heartland - the “Central San Joaquin Valley” as it is named - where Fiorina's points hit-home the most dramatically.
Known by Californians simply as the “central valley,” the region comprises a vast, expansive territory that stretches from the northern tip of Los Angeles County through the center of the state and up to and beyond the state’s capitol city of Sacramento. If today you were to travel north or south through this region you’d see the influence of bad politics in Washington, and expressions of outrage that Central Californians feel toward their federal government.
In this before-and-after composite image, (Top) Full water levels are visible in the Bidwell Marina at Lake Oroville on July 20, 2011 in Oroville, California. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Back in 2008, during the final months of the George W. Bush presidency, officials at the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife imposed dramatic restrictions on how Californians could use their own water.
The agency, a subdivision of the U.S. Department of the Interior (which was at that time led by Bush appointee and former Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne) determined that a non-indigenous fish species known as the “Delta Smelt” had become endangered because of too much fresh water flowing out of the Sierra Nevada mountains (a mountain range that lies along the California-Nevada border) and in to the central valley below. As a “fix” for the alleged endangerment, the federal agency ordered restrictions on the water run-off, which began the now six-year-old policy of sending billions of gallons of fresh water annually into the Pacific Ocean.
The policy first imposed by former Interior Secretary Kempthorne was continued by his predecessor, Obama appointee Ken Salazar, and remains in place today at the discretion of current Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. And while environmentalists both within government and among the private sector herald the water restrictions as a lasting victory for “earth justice,” actual human beings in Central California, many of whose families have farmed the region for generations, now suffer with declining property values, lost productivity, and lost livelihoods.
“California is a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology,” Fiorina told Beck of the Golden State's water crisis.
That statement may, itself, sound ideological. Yet as Central California farmers failed to get a reprieve from the brutal federal water policy in federal court last January, even the Associated Press conceded that the water restrictions have now forced farmers to “leave thousands of acres unplanted in the nation’s most fertile agricultural region.”
Despite the facts being what they are, those committed to perpetuating the global warming narrative in California dismiss the reality of destructive government policy and instead clamor for more regulation.
Earlier this month, for example, the New York Times lamented that California's rainfall and water savings rates are at dangerously low levels. But lost in the minutia is the fact that as recently as four years ago, California enjoyed record-high levels of snow and rain, even as the state's farmers are prohibited by federal law from collecting and saving water.
Will America stop sacrificing individual lives and livelihoods at the altar of a radical ideology? If it is to be, we'll need the facts – and a lot less dogma.
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