Sunday 18 July 2021

The corrupted tobacco economist network Part 58 - The role of Terry L. Anderson

Overview of previous posts here

As seen in the previous chapters, in the 1990's think tanks and libertarians started attacking all environmental sciences. The tobacco economists took part in this attack, with Terry L. Anderson playing a key role as an ideologist

Selection of publications:

1991: Terry L. Anderson wrote the book Free Market Environmentalism with Donald R. Leal. It became one of the books laying the grounds for the libertarian ideological attack on all environmental sciences.

Richard Stroup and Terry L. Anderson would become early TASSC's supporters and they were among the people exporting the TASSC-strategy to Europe through the UK based Institute of Economic Affairs. Both also were adjunct scholars at the Cato Institute

1995: Terry L. Anderson wrote a chapter in the book The True State of the Planet, attacking a wide variety of environmental issues. It's one of the first examples where the work of the economists and global warming denialism would emerge on the same surface. 

  • Chapter 1, by Nicholas Eberstadt - Population, Food, and Income: Global Trends in the Twentieth Century
  • Chapter 2, by Dennis Avery - Saving the Planet with Pesticides: Increasing Food Supplies While Preserving the Earth's Biodiversity
  • Chapter 3, by Robert C. Balling, Jr. - Global Warming: Messy Models, Decent Data, and Pointless Policy
  • Chapter 4, by Stephen Moore - The Coming Age of Abundance
  • Chapter 5, by Bruce N. Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold - The Causes and Prevention of Cancer: The Role of Environment
  • Chapter 6, by Roger A. Sedjo - Forests: Conflicting Signals
  • Chapter 7, by Stephen R. Edwards - Conserving Biodiversity: Resources for Our Future
  • Chapter 8, by Terry L. Anderson - Water Options for the Blue Planet
  • Chapter 9, by Kent Jeffreys - Rescuing the Oceans
  • Chapter 10, by Indur M. Goklani - Richer is Cleaner: Long Term Trends in Global Air Quality

Do notice in this book tobacco economist Terry L. Anderson and Kent Jeffreys (another author of a pro-tobacco report), suddenly became "specialists" in water pollution....

1997: (with Donald R. Leal) : Enviro-Capitalists: Doing Good While Doing Well. Hoover Institution. The book received a positive pal-review of fellow tobacco economist Bruce Yandle

1997: Terry L. Anderson and Pamela S. Snyder: Water Markets: Priming the Invisible Pump. Published by the Cato Institute.

2000: The Greening of U.S. Foreign Policy (with Henry I. Miller), published by the Hoover Institution. Anderson stated [2]

The green hand of foreign policy is a threat to national sovereignty without the offsetting benefit of improved environmental quality

2000: editor of Political Environmentalism:Going Behind the Green Curtain. Hoover Institution, also containing a chapter by network economist Bruce Yandle.

2001: Terry L. Anderson & Bruce Yandle were editors of the book Agriculture and the Environment – Searching for Greener Pastures published by the Hoover Institution.

2003: Anderson was editor of You Have to Admit It’s Getting Better—The Environment That is, another book published by the Hoover Institution.   

Tobacco economist Robert E. McCormick wrote the chapter The Relation Between Net Carbon Emissions and Income. While McCormick took no position on the scientific side, was poorly informed, writing "others claim there is no evidence of global warming; some even say the Earth is cooling"

Together Anderson's books (more than listed here) have played an important ideological role. All published by libertarian think tanks, they helped the message the industry and TASSC needed, by stating it would be better for the environment/health issues if there would be no government at all. His books have played an important role in creating a mindset in which the think tanks started drifting away from reality.

These books were highly ideological. Yet it is not impossible the books were commissioned by some industry. As early as 1987, during the "evaluations of economists sessions", the Tobacco Institute already remarked


Terry L. Anderson became George W. Bush's advisor on public lands issues somewhere in the late 1990's.  

In 2014, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the Keystone-pipeline. Written on behalf of his oil industry clients?