I heard it described as an inversion of the OPEC cartel. China can now influence prices as much as they can/could, up to a point. They prepared in Feb by buying 200M barrels, as if they had uncannily high confidence Trump was going to start a war with Iran.

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toomuchtodo 15 hours ago | parent [-]

China can now directly control the rate at which the world electrifies transportation and transitions to clean energy, through controlling the price of oil, which is a direct input into how rapidly countries importing clean tech from China do so. Want to stoke exports? Increase oil imports until the target crude oil price been reached. Slow them? Reduce oil imports to relax global oil prices, reducing demand for clean tech. Like a central bank using short term interest rates to govern economic run rate.

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e...

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seanmcdirmid 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Their demand isn’t that elastic, they can lower prices but personal transport is electrifying fast, and they will eventually not have many places to use oil after their reserves are full. They only need so much for non transport uses also.

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