Steven Kopits is the President of Princeton Energy Advisors, and has been a guest blogger on The Barrel numerous times in the past. Seven years ago, when I first turned my attention full time to oil, one of the strangest concepts I encountered was the “call on OPEC”. The call on OPEC means different things in different contexts, but fundamentally, it is as non-economic and culturally imperialist a term as one could imagine. The call of OPEC works like this. Non-OPEC countries are assumed to produce as much as they can, guided essentially by price signals. Whatever demand is left over can be served by OPEC. OPEC is thus assumed to “balance the market” and the number of barrels necessary to do so is the “call on OPEC.” Now, imagine this concept grafted onto, say, automobile production. Suppose an American policy-maker argued that GM and Ford should produce as many cars as they […]