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3. I was watching a report on TV the other night. It said OPEC cut production at one point, and even influenced non-member countries to cut production, to raise prices. All this information was pulled from OPEC memos. They said that OPEC has the gas prices about $1 more a gallon than they should be.



Okay. I watched a report on how UFOs circles the USS Theodore Roosevelt (seriously, I did). Could be true. And maybe what you saw was too. You can choose to believe what you'd like we all make choices on what to believe, I'm just saying, based on what I know that OPEC isn't as evil as people want to believe they are. It just doesn't make sense for them to be. Virtually anything on the TV these days paints Big Oil and/or OPEC as being the harbinger of evil thesedays because people want someone to blame because they don't want to blame themselves and their rising energy usage coupled with their own people, as speculators, driving the price up.

High prices increase interest in alternative sources of energy as well as significantly increase investment in alternative, non-OPEC oil that is viable to drill because of higher prices. OPEC memos are freely available. Go back and read what they were doing when gas was $20/barrel, they were trying to increase their quotas to further drive the price down because at less than $20/barrel the output from non-OPEC nations decreased because it cost too much to get out of the ground. They're constantly playing around, and in the grand scheme of things it rarely does much to the price outside of a few weeks because, despite their own desires to cut prices and output or raise prices and output, their member nations tend to do whatever the hell the want to anyhow.

I didn't see anyone trying to help Exxon-Mobil (then seperate companies) or any of the others when oil was just $13/barrel and they couldn't meet their cost of capital. They were hurting pretty bad for a while there when the price of oil was so low. They were basically forced into the mega-mergers in an effort to drive costs down in the face of such cheap oil. But they want to moan when the price of oil goes up and Exxon benefits; no different than some guy being lucky enough to own $10,000 worth of some penny stock that went up 12000% today (and there was probably at least one that did). You've got to take the bad with the good. People want to tax Exxon extra for making so much, but no one was there with handouts when they weren't.

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IDK, but maybe even at $40 a barrel, oil is overpriced. Certainly it's more reasonable than the current cost, but if OPEC, which encompasses most of the major oil producing countries, wants it at that price, then I bet they're making a pretty penny on it. One group controlling of anyone thing is not good. There is little competition in the oil market.




I think OPEC covers a little less than you think. Not even a majority of oil comes from OPEC. Less than 40% of the world's oil comes from OPEC nations, and less than 20% of the US' oil comes from OPEC nations.

I don't disagree that oil is over-priced. But OPEC is producing more oil now than it ever has, so they're clearly not the problem. Saying that they're controlling production just flies in the face of the facts. You could say that they're not doing enough to further increase supply by drilling more wells, build more infrastructure, and pump even more oil, but then why should they? Not using the capacity they have to artificially control supply is one thing, it's quite another to say that they have some responsibility to increase supply.

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