Conspiracy theories can't account for the supply problems with petroleum. For example,
speculators, mistakenly cast as the villains, play a role in discovering the market the price of oil every trading day, not only when it ran up to $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008, but also when the price collapsed down into the $30's last spring. The speculators didn't just run the price up that high as a goof to see if we'd fall for it.