Liam Denning, Columnist

Why OPEC Has to Keep Pumping

Talks in Vienna and Paris highlight threats to the cartel.

December 4, 2015 at 5:18 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

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On Friday, Paris was full of people trying to change the world and Vienna was full of people trying to cope with a changing world. This is not a coincidence.

As the latest round of global climate talks were drawing toward the end of their first week, OPEC's ministers were talking about what to do about $40 oil. The truth is there's precious little they can do right now -- which is why they effectively did nothing on Friday. But if delegates in Paris cheer at OPEC's impotence, they aren't considering all the implications.