There are no more pricing doves in OPEC.

That may seem obvious when the price of oil has shot past $90 a barrel. Saudi Arabia could throw more spare capacity on the market to cool things off. But the Saudis are not hectoring other oil producers about price restraint.

Their traditional line about high oil prices sapping economic growth, or encouraging too much investment in oil alternatives, just isn't part of the dialogue anymore.

Several economic and political developments are changing the oil market and quieting the doves.

Exchange rates, for example. Oil is priced in dollars. On a dollar basis, oil prices have gone up nearly 44 percent this year. That's not good for the U.S. economy. And the problem isn't confined to oil imports. The commodity-price index compiled by The Economist magazine shows dollar-based inflation in food and industrial commodities up 17.7 percent this year ­ a Halloweenish gallop in prices.

Measured in euros, however, commodity inflation is up just 3.7 percent.

The value of the U.S. dollar has fallen so rapidly this year that Europe, Asia and Canada are all pretty ho-hum about the impact on consumers of higher oil prices, given that that impact is much lower once it is converted into their own currencies.

The OPEC producers of the Middle East and Africa, meanwhile, have seen their purchasing power with their major trading partner ­ Europe ­ fall with the dollar. Charging a higher dollar price for oil just helps even things out.

David Kirsch of PFC Energy, a Washington-based energy economics consulting firm, points out that most OPEC members didn't recover the purchasing power they had from a 1985 barrel of oil until about 2000, given lower oil prices and exchange rate fluctuations.

Add in the shifts in purchasing power caused by changes in oil production and inflation in the oil-producing countries, and the Mideast members of OPEC got back to where they were in 1985 just three years ago, Mr. Kirsch said.

OPEC has talked over the years of shifting from the dollar to an oil contract priced in a basket of currencies, although no one is pushing for that at the moment.

Iran already has shifted payments for its oil to euros and yen to avoid U.S. economic sanctions on banks doing business with the Islamic regime. The Saudis and other Arab OPEC producers (with the exception of Kuwait) stick with the dollar in part because they use the dollar as a base to peg the value of their domestic currencies. Venezuela likes pricing oil in dollars because, despite frosty political relations, its major trading partner is the United States.

Despite exchange rate woes, OPEC doves might still have a case if the U.S. economy were the locomotive for world economic growth, because slowing down the United States would mean slowing down world oil consumption.

But now there are other locomotives. China continues to grow at a double-digit rate. Europe and Japan are growing. While the U.S. economy might be slowing thanks to credit woes and, perhaps, high oil prices, others are still doing fine.

The Saudis used to warn that high prices would spur growth in alternatives to OPEC oil. Current prices are a tremendous incentive to get oil from other places, whether Canadian oil sands, the Russian Arctic or off the coast of Africa in the Southern Atlantic.

But demand for oil is so strong that none of these sources of oil is going to put pressure on OPEC.

Finally, the silence of the doves might be explained by the growing worldwide alarm about how fossil fuels heat the Earth's atmosphere. In OPEC, the hawks used to be countries that did not have big oil reserves – countries that wanted their money now because they would not have the ability to produce much oil in the future.

However, with global warming pushing consuming nations to find other ways to produce energy, a mentality of "the future is now" prevails in every oil-producing country. Having centuries' worth of oil reserves won't be worth much if the world finds a way to use biofuels, batteries or some other fuel to power the cars of the future.

So, for now at least, pricing hawks rule the roost.