One perspective, from a reader:

Jonah, The whole notion of “punishing speculators” is ludicrous. Speculators are unfairly in the cross hairs of politicians looking to score cheap points with their gasoline-consuming constituents. I have been involved in the Futures markets for 25 years, and it still amazes me how little the mainstream media, the public and our politicians know about Futures trading. (To the day he died, my Dad thought I worked in the stock market.) What always gets left out of the discussion is that Futures is a zero-sum game. Unlike the stock market, for every contract bought, one is sold; for every dollar made, a dollar is lost. So if someone is speculating by buying Futures contracts, someone else must feel there is an economic justification for taking the other side of the trade. Also, professional Futures speculators are ambivalent about making money in rising or falling markets. They go with the flow, so to speak. So when oil prices eventually come tumbling down — the history of oil prices has been one of boom and bust since the first well was drilled Titusville, PA, in 1859 — the same evil speculators will be involved. That said, there can be no denying that speculation has had an impact on today’s prices. I said at the start that few people outside of the industry understand how the Futures markets work. One of the reasons for this is that there is not a great amount of transparency about who’s buying and who’s selling. Look, if an investment bank or a hedge fund or a “large investors” wants to speculate that oil prices are going to move higher based purely on fundamentals, then they should have no problem with publically reporting their total holdings in the market – both on and off exchanges. After all, if it is the fundamentals that ultimately determine the price and the fundamentals are bullish, what could be the downside to such transparency?