Scientist running for office to challenge 'climate change' agenda

Art Robinson

With Oregon considering an economy-threatening 50-cent-per-gallon tax to combat "climate change," Art Robinson contends it's time for a scientist to join the state legislature.

As a former colleague of Nobel-winner Linus Pauling, member of the biochemistry faculty at the University of California at San Diego and chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, Robinson believes he fits the bill.

"I think that Oregon voters would be benefited by sending a scientist to their state Senate in order to correct the lies that are being told there – lies that parrot the pronouncements of unethical and untruthful 'scientists,'" he said in a column for WND.

Robinson is running for the state Senate in Oregon's District 2. The primary is scheduled for next Tuesday. But in a district in which 68% of the voters are Republican, the GOP primary effectively is the general election.

A five-time Republican nominee for the U.S. House in Oregon's Fourth District, Robinson says the state lawmakers pushing the "climate change" legislation are informed by "pseudo-scientists" who want to scrap "hydrocarbon energy."

He argued that nearly the entire human race depends for its existence on machines powered directly or indirectly by hydrocarbon fuels.

"If these fuels are abruptly diminished, Americans will be significantly harmed," he said. "Elsewhere in the world, there are still hundreds of millions of people trying to lift themselves from poverty and tyranny using hydrocarbon-fueled machines. With diminished hydrocarbon fuel, these people will slip backward into poverty and death."

Art Robinson

Robinson, who prides himself as a defender of the Second Amendment, property rights and individual liberties, noted on his campaign website the rebellion last year in Oregon against a "cap and trade" bill that drew nationwide attention.

A resident of Southern Oregon, south of Grants Pass, citizens in his area and other rural parts of the state, he said, "stood up and made their voices heard in a big way, and our whole nation noticed."

"Liberal legislators from Portland were determined to pass a cap and trade bill that would have devastated families, businesses, farmers and ranchers all throughout Oregon," he said. "But all they ended up doing was inspiring the Timber Unity movement. I felt this was long overdue."

He says on his campaign site that for decades he's challenged "radical environmentalists who continue to threaten our most vital industries like logging, ranching, farming and mining."

"Here in Southern Oregon, we’ve gotten far too used to being pushed around politically by people from the other end of the state. They insist that taxing our last remaining private industries is the only way to save us from climate change while our government-owned forests burn almost every summer."

Robinson told WND his candidacy for Oregon state Senate has stirred up "a hornet's nest" in Salem, the capital, where a few politicians and the "business lobby" are pouring money into his opponent's campaign in the Republican primary.

Of great urgency, he said, is that cap-and-trade “is now almost a political reality” in Oregon, one likely to become law during the next legislative session. Although legislative opponents point to the economic damage from raising fuel costs, Robinson says “those advocating cap-and-trade claim the political high ground. They say that they are saving the world.”

What is really needed, he says, is that someone with the proper scientific credentials must say on the Senate floor, “You say that you are saving us from catastrophic ocean flooding. Here is a graph of the ocean level during the past 200 years. The level has risen steadily at a rate of 7 inches per century, and that rate did not increase at all as hydrocarbon fuels became more and more utilized. A slightly more than one-foot rise in two centuries as the world recovers toward the 3,000-year-mean temperature from a cold snap called the ‘Little Ice Age’ is not to be feared.”

“There are many truths like this that I want the Senate to hear,” Robinson told WND. “If truth remains silent in Salem, Oregon politics will become an even more onerous problem for Oregonians.”

Regarding the current pandemic and the state’s shutdown, he says: “We must return our economy to full production as soon as possible. It is unsustainable to give Oregonians money to buy things that they are simultaneously ordered not to produce.”

“My public policy would be to give Oregonians back their personal and professional freedom and simultaneously carefully monitor the progress of the coronavirus, which is already showing signs of being a rapidly diminishing threat.”

Besides being a noted scientist, Robinson identifies himself as a “pro-family constitutional Republican” who is fundamentally independent and therefore not beholden to “the special interests, lobbyists and career politicos in Salem who have caused so much trouble for Oregonians.”

A Robinson campaign ad features the endorsement of the late astronaut Scott Carpenter, a member of the iconic Mercury Seven who became the second American in space.

Carpenter, who became the public voice of NASA’s Apollo moon program, was a longtime friend of Robinson.

"In my experience with space flight, I have come to know many men of excellence. Art Robinson is the best can-do guy I know," Carpenter says in the ad.

Carpenter personally campaigned for Robinson when he ran for Congress. The astronaut traveled the district, making endorsement speeches and drawing large crowds.

See the campaign ad:

Robinson received a B.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1963 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, San Diego in 1968.

In 1980, after co-founding the Linus Pauling Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., with Pauling, Robinson founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine with the help of his chemist wife, Laurelee.

They had six children, which they homeschooled. In 1988, Lauralee died suddenly from hemorrhagic pancreatitis, leaving Art to care for six young children, aged 18 months to 12 years.

He restructured their homeschooling curriculum to enable his children to teach themselves. Today, three have PhDs in areas such as nuclear engineering and chemistry. Two are doctors of veterinary medicine and another has a master’s degree in nuclear engineering. The college and postgraduate schooling was financed in part by the sales of "The Robinson Curriculum," which became popular among homeschoolers.