It must also be true that, as the world’s reserves of oil diminish, and the value of that diminishing resource increases, agreement between the producers and consumers on how best to manage this economic process would seem to be highly desirable. Such an approach would surely be preferable to a “free market” which presumably would simply mean that the producers should extract the maximum price from their remaining oil reserves, regardless of the political or economic consequences for the consumers – much as the consuming nations have quite happily taken advantage of excess supply in the 1980s and 1990s to reduce the oil price as far as possible.

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