As for "greedy speculators;" I'm not sure why attacking profit seeking individuals who are a useful function of a free market system, is in any way virtuous.  As Murray Rothbard put it:

When Iraq invaded Kuwait, knowledgeable people in the oil market immediately and understandably forecast a future drop in the supply of oil. (In fact, as soon as Iraq began to mass troops on the Kuwait border a few weeks before the invasion, crude prices began to rise sharply, in expectation of a possible invasion.) Actions on the market, e.g., demands for the purchase or accumulation of oil, are not at all mechanistic: they are a function of what knowledgeable people on the market anticipate will happen.

Far from being disruptive or "unconscionable," this sort of speculative demand performs an important economic function. If people were mechanistic and did not anticipate the future, a cutoff of Middle Eastern oil would disrupt the economy by causing a sudden drop in supply and a huge jump in prices. Speculative anticipation eases this volatility by raising prices more gradually; then, if supply is sharply cut off, speculators can unload their oil or gasoline stocks at a profit and lower prices from what they would have been. In short, speculators, by anticipating the future, help to smooth fluctuations and to allocate oil or any other commodity to its most-valued uses, over time.