OPEC+ Is Not a Cartel. It's a Thermostat.
In the desert, the man who shouts about water usually has none to sell. Bear this in mind when you read the annual obituaries of oil.
They arrive like clockwork — a London think tank, a glossy report: demand has peaked, the transition is accelerating. And oil attends its own funeral, sends flowers, and returns to work. The obituaries are always written from the cities where the transition is furthest along, about a world that mostly lives elsewhere. Western demand did peak; congratulations to all involved. But the barrels that matter now are in Asia and Africa, where rising incomes still mean first cars, first air conditioners, first flights. The transition is real. It is also, for now, an addition to the energy system — not yet a substitution of it.
This is where patience becomes strategy. OPEC+ is routinely called a cartel, the way a blunt instrument is routinely used — often, and without precision. A cartel fixes prices. What OPEC+ manages is spare capacity: the market's shock absorber. When prices run too hot, barrels return; when the market drowns, barrels are withheld. A thermostat, not a cartel. The alternative — the pre-2016 free-for-all — gave us $140 oil followed by $30 oil, which pleased no one except, briefly, the speculators. As we say at home: patience is the key to relief.
Is this power used strategically? Naturally. Spare capacity is leverage, and leverage unused is leverage wasted — a lesson the Gulf learned decades ago and has not misplaced. But the caricature of producers gleefully immiserating consumers misses the actual arithmetic: no producer wants prices so high they accelerate the transition, nor so low they break their own treasury. The thermostat has a comfort zone. Everyone — consumer and producer alike — quietly benefits from it.
And we will be polite about the sermons. The green homilies from Western capitals are delivered from cities whose lights have never flickered; the assurances from the East should be weighed, not worshipped. We wish all our friends well — and we continue to sell, steadily, to the half of humanity still climbing toward the light switch. The barrel has moved house: from Western headlines to Asian demand, African cities, and an alliance of producers that spans the old divides. The market did not die. It relocated. The obituary writers were not invited to the new address.