Think of it not as production, think of it as extraction, a conversion of crude safely stored in underground vaults to dollars. Holding back has the double bene

Think of it not as production, think of it as extraction, a conversion of crude safely stored in underground vaults to dollars. Holding back has the double benefit of rising prices now and increasing the amount you can sell in the future. The price-fix is not just about keeping it up, it also has an element of not outdoing each other in the "oil futures" speculation that would be implicit in not extracting now. No oil country (well, no oil country except Norway I suppose) would be happy to enjoy a dominant market share now at the cost of having to leave the market earlier than their peers. One might expect that all the talk about CO2 would shift the balance between those two sides within OPEC (and those that tag along?), but habits change slowly.