Wealth & Money Quote by John Anderson

Policy-speak rarely tries to seduce you, but this one does. Anderson’s line is engineered to make an environmental compromise feel like a business opportunity, not a moral lecture. The first clause - “one of the issues that will have to be worked through” - performs calm managerial inevitability. It concedes complexity without granting opponents any real leverage; whatever the objection is, it’s already been downgraded to a technical hurdle.

Then comes the pivot: “however let me make the point.” That move is rhetorical crowd control, a way of clearing the table for the argument he actually wants to land. The phrase “I think anyone would accept” is the soft coercion of consensus. It’s not evidence; it’s a social nudge. Disagreeing suddenly marks you as unreasonable, or worse, unserious.

The real payload is “if you set it up properly.” That conditional does two jobs at once. It reassures skeptics that markets and regulation can be designed (not merely hoped for), while also pre-emptively excusing failure: if outcomes disappoint, the setup was improper, not the premise.

Context matters: in late-20th and early-21st century Anglophone politics, environmental policy often survives only when translated into growth logic. Anderson speaks in that dialect. “Better environmental outcomes” is deliberately vague - no numbers, no timelines - while “create more wealth” is crisp and emotionally legible. The subtext is an attempt to fuse stewardship with self-interest: conservation not as sacrifice, but as optimization of “the available resource,” a phrase that quietly treats nature as inventory waiting to be managed.