There’s a very 1980s feel about the oil market right now. If you’re hoping the 2020s are going to see the peak and slump in carbon emissions that we need to avert catastrophic global warming, that’s very good news.
Saudi Arabia’s decision at the weekend to cut one million barrels of crude production echoes a pattern that we’ve not seen since before the birth of the country’s de facto ruler, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “We will do whatever is necessary to bring stability to this market,” his half-brother, the country’s energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, said after a weekend meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which also extended other nations’ existing cuts through 2024.
That invocation of stability calls to mind the rhetoric pioneered by Prince Abdulaziz’s most celebrated predecessor, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani. During his 24-year career as the kingdom’s oil minister until 1986, Yamani promoted price stability as the key goal of global energy policies — with his country using its unparalleled reserves of crude to guarantee that objective.
Rarely was that task harder than in the wake of the second oil shock in the early 1980s. On one hand, European countries caught out by the 1973 crude embargo were experiencing a surge in output, as investments in domestic fields such as the North Sea started to come to fruition. The UK alone increased output by more than a million daily barrels between 1979 and 1985.
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