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Amidst growing national outrage as oil from BP's deep-sea oil well blowout spreads across the Gulf of Mexico and has just reached the delicate Louisiana coastline, what's noteworthy about Arthur B. Robinson, running on the GOP ticket this year for Oregon's 4th Congressional District, is his stated support for disposing of oil and nuclear waste at sea which, according to Robinson, is the safest place in the world to dispose of certain types of industrial waste material.
In 2004, Robinson's "Access To Energy" newsletter contained a column titled, "OCEAN DUMPING? YES!" which declared,
"Wastes dumped into the deep ocean will soon reach the bottom, where they are less hazardous than nearly any other place on Earth. Most materials will remain there: marine organisms are rare in the deep ocean, food chains are long, and few materials will be carried back to mankind. And that is what waste disposal is all about...
...The oil companies' reckless greed, we are told, has devastated the oceans with their oil spills.
Baloney."
But Robinson then went even further, claiming that the Earth's oceans are "starved for" crude oil,
"As for oil spills in the open and deep ocean, they amount to far less than natural seeps and river runoff, and any unbiased oceanographer will confirm that they are a boon to marine life, inflicting damage mainly on the oil and shipping companies. For crude oil is a natural, organic, biodegradable product of the earth's ancient plant and animal life, and it is this type of hydrocarbon that marine life in the open and deep ocean is starved for."
Further, explained Robinson in another article in the 2004 newsletter, the free market, and the profit motive, are absolutely the best guarantors of a clean environment:
"The environment, then, has no better protector than its owner, and no worse enemy than a system where everything belongs to "the people." Species are endangered when they belong to everybody and nobody; and nothing short of the profit motive will protect them."
Robinson's 2004 "Access To Energy" newsletter post heavily referenced an article that originally appeared in a 1985 UN Environmental Program publication, by retired professor of oceanography Dr. C.L. Osterbeg, titled "Waste Disposal: Where should it be? Land or Sea?" which argued that dumping toxic waste in the deep ocean could protect fragile coastline areas. Observed Robinson,
"Nuclear wastes, which are not singled out in Osterberg's article, are obviosly [sic] subject to the same principles, even though their disposal is (except in the programmed reflexes of the scaremongers) a less acute problem than chemical wastes..."
Osterberg's views were not considered fringe in the late 1980's. In response to a new US law banning the dumping of sewage and industrial wastes in the ocean after December 31, 1991 professor Osterberg managed to place a June 14, 1989 op-ed in the New York Times, "Deep Ocean: The Safest Dump," which observed,
"The new law places two-thirds of our planet off-limits to mankind's wastes. This is an interesting new philosophy: that our wastes should go where we live -- the land -- and not where we don't live -- the much bigger, deep ocean, with water depths of 3,000 feet or more."
British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil well, now blown out and gushing many thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, was drilled at a water depth of 5,000 feet.
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