Carly Fiorina is Dangerously Stupid and Careless

This is the kind of statement that your drunk, fat, bitter, conservative uncle makes at Christmas dinner, not a potential President of the United States-

“It is delusional for President Obama and Hillary Clinton and anyone else to say that climate change is our near-term most severe security threat,” she told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace. “It is ISIS, period, followed closely by Iran and perhaps Russia.”

There are three main problems with Carly Fiorina's statement here. The first is her dismissal of climate change as a serious, near-term problem is not in line with our Defense Department's views on the matter-

“Climate change will affect the Department of Defense’s ability to defend the nation and poses immediate risks to U.S. national security,” the report reads. “Weather has always affected military operations, and as the climate changes, the way we execute operations may be altered or constrained.”

In 2013, Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III — then-commander of the U.S. Pacific Command — calledclimate change the greatest security threat to the Pacific region.

“We have interjected into our multilateral dialogue — even with China and India — the imperative to kind of get military capabilities aligned [for] when the effects of climate change start to impact these massive populations,” he said. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.”

So the Pentagon, always a liberal bastion, does not agree with Fiorina on whether or not climate change is a threat. I'm not sure who will convincer her if they won't, but i'm not sure she actually needs convincing here. This is all basically that her donors don't want action on climate change, so she won't do it. Fine. That's terrible, but we can call it what it is. The second problem with her rambling is actually fairly offensive though. She rebukes the value of nations acting together to combat this crisis, and even pretends that doesn't happen-

Fiorina has denied that she personally accepts the science that climate change is happening and is caused by humans. And on Sunday, she also said she didn’t think the Paris climate talks — which begin this week and which Obama has called a “powerful rebuke” to the terrorists that attacked Paris — were a worthwhile exercise.

“If you read the fine print of the science, what the scientists tell us, all those scientists who say climate change is real and manmade, they also tell us that a single nation acting alone will make no difference at all, that it would take a concerted global effort over 30 years costing trillions of dollars,” she said. “I think the likelihood is near zero. So no, I don’t think [the Paris climate conference] is very productive.

But the entire point of the Paris climate talks is to ensure that countries aren’t acting alone. The entire point is to bring countries around the world — the planet’s most heavily-emitting countries and the countries that contribute very little to climate change — to develop a global agreement to get the planet on a path towards limiting warming. And in talking about the costs of climate action, Fiorina doesn’t mention the cost of inaction — acting on climate, according to one study, would avoid more than $300 trillion in damages. And even without taking those damages into account, acting on climate change would actually be fairly inexpensive, as Joe Romm has explained before on Climate Progress.

So a bunch of nations are going to meet in Paris, the sight of a terrorist attack recently, and she dismisses the worth of that. Then she talks about how one nation can't do anything about climate change anyway, at a time when a bunch of nations are meeting on the matter. She looks both cold and totally tone deaf. Kind of like your bitter, conservative uncle.

The third problem I have with her statement is the careless, crass nature of it to begin with. George W. Bush ran around the world naming our global "enemies" and the results were disastrous. After he declared the "Axis of Evil"- Iraq, Iran, and North Korea- we fought a failed, disastrous war in Iraq, while Iran and North Korea went off and started nuclear weapons programs. The very reason we have ISIS today, the reason we wasted so much money in Iraq, the reason we needed a deal with Iran, and the reason South Korea is sitting on edge, is that kind of cowboy, tough guy, stupid rhetoric. What makes Fiorina's stupid rhetoric even worse is that she is naming Russia as an actual enemy. You may not like President Putin's actions, I'm not a big fan. Kicking dirt on him though, naming him as an enemy, has the potential to push him to more robust action, and more robust action might mean a war. If there were one nation on the planet you don't want a war with, it's Russia. Russia could actually hit us with a nuclear warhead (as we could to them, but that's small consolation for the people hit). You don't provoke a fight like that.

Carly Fiorina doesn't know what she's talking about, much like Donald Trump and Ben Carson. She's also reckless with what she says, to the point of being dangerous. Fine detail facts don't matter to her, and repercussions aren't real to her. She's not up to the task of being a Presidential candidate, let alone a President. This kind of stupid talk could be really bad for our nation.