10 Problems No One Wants To Admit About Green Lantern
9. ...And GL Rebirth Made Things Worse
From the sixties through to the early noughties there were several Earth-based Lanterns. Jordan was the first, but soon after that came Guy Gardner and John Stewart. Kyle Rayner, meanwhile, would emerge as a potent force in the mid-to-late nineties, around the time Hal's presence began to decline.
A storyline called Emerald Twilight was meant to spell Jordan's doom, and for a while it did just that. The storyline saw the Silver Age Lantern go insane after Mongul destroyed his hometown of Coast City. He took on the Lantern Corps itself, tapped into the Power Battery on Oa, and renamed himself Parallax. He killed the entire Corps which made Rayner the last Lantern, and himself a recurring villain - up until Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! came along.
That story saw Jordan sacrifice himself to save the galaxy, where he would then become the new version of the Spectre. Other Lanterns filled the void, but writer Geoff Johns decided to resurrect him in 2005 with GL: Rebirth, which retconned the whole Parallax business to have been an alien entity that controlled Hal to commit the aforementioned genocide.
Hal's return was itself a little obtuse, but erasing the red in his ledger made it so much worse. He was no longer accountable for his actions, and him lashing out at Batman was the petulant cherry on top of an already contrived cake.