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Today, the Mitt Romney for President campaign released an advertisement it calls Ocean. When I heard about this advertisement, I thought that it might be about, you know, the ocean.

I was surprised. To this point in the campaign, Mitt Romney has almost completely ignored environmental issues, pretending that the threats to our environment don’t matter much.

Of course, most Americans are very aware of the threats to our environment. We experience those threats on a daily basis, in the form of sicknesses caused by pollution, in the form of landscapes degraded by unsustainable exploitation, and in the form of the many impacts of global warming we’re already experiencing.

Anyone who pays attention to the ocean as something more than a playground is aware of the increasing peril in which the Earth’s oceans have been placed. Huge dead zones resulting from polluted runoff are turning once-fertile ocean waters into a lethal soup that kills almost everything that swims in it. Immense jellyfish swarms swamp beaches around the world as the marine food web tilts out of balance. Around the world, fish populations are crashing and coral reefs are being bleached white.

Could Mitt Romney be seeking to address the lack of environmental substance in his campaign? Could Romney have prepared an advertisement that deals with the grave threat of the ecological collapse of our planet’s oceans?

Sadly, the Romney campaign is not at all about the ocean crisis. It’s about videogames and television and movies and the Internet.

In the last line of the Ocean advertisement, Romney says, “If we get serious about this, we can actually do a great deal to clean up the water in which our kids and our grandkids are swimming.”

Of course, when Romney says that, he’s not talking about actually cleaning up the water. No, I searched Mitt Romney’s campaign web site, and it turns out that the Romney campaign doesn’t have any materials dealing with water pollution. In fact, there isn’t a single place on the Mitt Romney presidential campaign web site where Mitt Romney states any commitment at all to fight pollution. The closest he comes to that is acknowledging, on a campaign blog, that some people ask him about mercury pollution sometimes. Romney doesn’t offer a policy for dealing with it, mind you. He just admits that sometimes people ask him about the issue.

When it comes to the issue of the severe depletion of once-rich populations of fish, Mitt Romney is silent. The only time Mitt Romney even mentions fish on his campaign web site is when he talks about going fishing.

Mitt Romney has a hell of a lot of nerve using the metaphor of cleaning up ocean water in a campaign advertisement when, in fact, his campaign is startlingly silent on the issue of the ocean crisis.

(Source: MittRomey.com)

Postscript: Mitt Romney’s Ocean advertisement is so bizarre in its implications that it’s difficult to discuss them all at once. Look for several more articles exploring different aspects of the weird world of Romney’s Ocean to come tomorrow.