OPEC Plays Oil Junkies for Suckers

NEW YORK I respect drug thugs. I don't like them. But I must give them their due. They have taught two of the world's biggest industries, oil and tobacco, how to keep addiction going.

Consider the oil industry, particularly that portion of it represented by the 13-member Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which controls 40 percent of the world's exploitable oil reserves.

OPEC ministers earlier this year gave the bum's rush to President Bush and other Western leaders who journeyed to Saudi Arabia and other OPEC member countries begging for increased oil production to help lower fuel prices for angry consumers back home.

Sorry, the OPEC ministers said. We can't do it. We're already producing as much oil as fast as we can.

Some OPEC ministers lectured the Western leaders, blaming them and their countrymen for the sad states of their oil-driven economies. To the United States, the OPEC leaders said: Your dollar is weak. Your consumers are greedy. You are spending too much money policing other peoples' countries. Get control of yourself. Stop asking for so much.

There was some truth in that criticism. But the lecture also was more than a little bit hypocritical. It's easy to preach to sinners when you are reaping billions of dollars from their profligacy. It's like some drug dealers who say they "wouldn't touch the stuff" that pays for their flashy lifestyles and who scorn the junkies who are willing to do anything to get it.

We have the same relationship with OPEC. But, shocked by gasoline prices above $4 a gallon for regular unleaded, many of us decided to change our ways. We drove 12 billion fewer miles this June than we did in June 2007. We parked our SUVs. We decided that it was okay to pay top dollar for smaller, more fuel-efficient automobiles, and we demanded that all car companies serving the U.S. market start making them.

Moreover, we started taking seriously the notion of alternative fuels, the possibility of consigning oil to obsolescence. Our national leaders followed our lead. Both Republican presidential hopeful John McCain and Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama have at least given lip service to a more aggressive federal campaign supporting the development and distribution of alternative fuels.

We finally were beginning to turn away from oil. How did OPEC, the beneficiary of one of the largest transfers of wealth in the history of mankind, respond?

Here's a dispatch from the Aug. 13 edition of the Financial Times: "OPEC pushed its oil production to the highest level in its 48-year history last month, even as demand was slipping in the United States and Europe, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said yesterday."

That dramatic increase in OPEC oil production, adding about 300,000 barrels daily to the world market -- an estimated 200,000 barrels a day less than what industry experts think OPEC can produce -- has helped to reduce the per-barrel price of oil by 24 percent over the past month, bringing it down to about $115 a barrel from a July high of $147.27.

Gasoline pump prices have fallen in turn, dropping below $4 a gallon for regular unleaded for the first time this summer. Oil industry experts are predicting that those prices will fall to at least $3.65 a gallon by summer's end.

The financial markets and consumers are all giddy over that news, like junkies who have just been given a free fix. They need to get control of themselves. They are being suckered, snookered worse than a pitiful street-corner addict.

OPEC is engaging in addiction marketing. It is doing now what it has done before whenever its biggest customers start getting serious about reform. It has increased production, lowered the price and made its drug of choice more accessible -- all in a bid to keep its high-paying customers hooked.

OPEC knows what the drug dealers know: Addiction is so much more attractive than the hard and often painful work of cleaning up one's act. Affordable addiction is even more attractive. It dulls the senses and corrupts the will to change, to travel a different and ultimately more nationally secure route.

The questions are: Will we fall for OPEC's latest fix? Will we abandon the path toward energy conservation and a more energy-secure nation? Will we sell our nation and our souls for another OPEC high?