Oct. 16 (Bloomberg) -- There’s only one thing to say about OPEC’s goal to be compensated for falling oil prices: Ha ha ha!

Folks, you must be kidding me. The stuff has made you rich. Government coffers are flush with the spoils of pumping “black gold” out of the ground and hastening global warming. Now you want us to cushion the blow as we combat the phenomenon?

It would be laughable if it weren’t an indicator of the difficulty of working together to make sure future generations can breathe. Anyone expecting big, history-making news at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December should think again.

Saudi Arabia, the biggest supplier in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is seeking to enlist other members to request compensation if environmental policies reduce demand for oil, the New York Times reports. It’s hardly the first time Saudi Arabia has pushed the idea, yet it plans to take a harder line on an issue that has moved to the forefront.

Even if meetings in Copenhagen result in ambitious plans to limit greenhouse gases and keep temperatures from rising, oil production won’t take a big hit anytime soon. Nobuo Tanaka, head of the International Energy Agency, spoke for many of us this week when he asked: “Do they really need to be compensated?”

No, and they shouldn’t be. It’s one thing for a government like the U.S. to use taxpayers’ money to save General Motors Corp. It’s quite another to ask the citizens of one nation to pay for the greed and complacency of producers that had decades to diversify their economies away from oil -- and didn’t.

Commodity Gods

OPEC should be thanking the commodity gods that crude oil prices reached a one-year high yesterday. Not long ago, the talk was of another Great Depression. Now the focus is on whether oil will rise toward $100 per barrel from $75. Like any self- respecting cartel, OPEC should revel in the difficulties that families are having filling gas tanks from New York to Seoul.

Governments around the world weren’t demanding compensation from OPEC in July 2008 when oil was approaching $150. Oil producers should look inward, own their plights and act accordingly. OPEC overplays its hand by supporting inflated energy prices, and everyone knows it except for its members.

Sure, the cartel helped out a little in the past year by boosting production here and there. Pipeline flows slowed pretty quickly, though, once markets stabilized and OPEC may be sowing the seeds of its own demise.

82 Years On

It’s disheartening to think that 82 years later, Upton Sinclair’s book “Oil!” still helps explain where we are. The last 12 months have been all about the excesses of capitalism, corruption, income inequality and obsession with fossil fuels that Sinclair explored in his 1927 novel.

The question is whether consumers are so fed up with oil producers’ greed that they will now make more effort to find alternative-energy sources. While hard to imagine two years ago, China is working to leapfrog the Japanese and the U.S. economies by using green technologies.

BYD Co. tells the story, and not just because its share price has gained 503 percent this year. The Chinese maker of the world’s first mass-produced plug-in hybrid car got the attention of Warren Buffett. Last year, BYD sold 225 million new shares to Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co.

Buffett is profiting from something that isn’t obvious to everyone: There is money to be made as China, India and other key developing nations work to slow environmental degradation. Deadly storms in the Philippines and Vietnam leave little doubt that rising world temperatures can no longer be ignored.

Climate Change

The same goes for residents of Sydney. Recent dust storms that reddened the skies and triggered health warnings are a signal that the fallout from climate change will increasingly affect one of the Asia-Pacific region’s financial centers.

We can debate the magnitude of BYD’s stock rally, which enabled founder Wang Chuanfu to jump 102 places to top the annual Hurun Rich List of China’s wealthiest people. What isn’t in dispute is the intensifying hunger to replace oil. Look no further than Detroit, where even GM is producing an electric car to compete with Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius hybrid.

Japan emerged from the 1970s oil shocks way ahead of the pack in the area of energy efficiency. It would be OPEC’s worst nightmare if this dynamic were afoot on a much larger scale at this very moment.

All over the globe, scientists are working on the next generation of fuel alternatives. By engineering high prices, OPEC is merely accelerating the process. Oil at $100 a barrel will fuel the very innovation the cartel would sooner avoid.

If you think oil producers should be compensated for this, that’s fine. Just keep my tax dollars out of it.

(William Pesek is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

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To contact the writer of this column: William Pesek in Tokyo at wpesek@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 15, 2009 15:00 EDT