Earth Day expunged from GOP vocabulary

On this 45th Earth Day we should note a strange phenomenon occurring in the GOP leadership over the past five years. The words "Earth Day" have disappeared from their vocabulary. Up till the 2008 election of climate change believer Barack Obama, Republican leaders were on the bandwagon to save the planet, promoting Earth Day and its mission. George Bush I and II were on board, as well as presidential contender John McCain, who, during th...e 2008 campaign, devoted an entire speech to Earth Day. In 2005, Mitt Romney worked to cap coal-fired power plant emissions as Massachusetts governor. But no more is anyone in the GOP talking up Earth Day in spite of the catastrophic damage we mere mortals have done to Mother Earth since Edwin L. Drake poked the first hole in her delicate surface in 1859 to extract in oil from the ground in Titusville, PA. Till then folks could only obtain oil from natural pooling on the surface, a meager amount not damaging to our precious atmosphere.

With Obama's election, the GOP vowed that anything the president supported, no matter how important it might be for our welfare, indeed our very survival, must be opposed without thought, exception or sanity. Hence, "Earth Day" simply vanished from their political utterances. Instead, they deny man made climate change, demand the president immediately green light the abominable Keystone XL Pipeline, ignore catastrophes like the BP Horizon disaster, and chant "Drill, Baby, Drill" like some demented cult mesmerized by the prospect of regaining the White House. The last recorded GOP leader to even mention Earth Day was Tennessee Senator and presidential contender Lamar Alexander in 2010. By 2012, global warming was completely off the table for every presidential contender. Only the most progressive, John Huntsman, who tweeted: "I trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy", realized his mistake and repented by saying, "This isn't the moment to take action on climate change". Even Mitt Romney became an anti-Obama global warming advocate in the 2012 election when he released his jobs plan, in which he pledged to amend the Clean Air Act so that carbon dioxide could not be regulated as a pollutant. “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” he said.

Alas, the Neanderthals that make up today's GOP appear to be gaining in the climate change debate. They've caused an alarming rise in the percentage of Americans who now disbelieve in man made climate change at the same time that the carbon dioxide levels rise alarmingly above 400 parts per million (the ratio of carbon dioxide to other gases in the atmosphere) for the first time in recorded history. Happy Earth Day all you Republican yahoos. You may not see the catastrophic effects from your myopia in your lifetime, but you kids and grandkids sure will