Simple… If we have a global recession, people consume less on unnecessary crap, and hence all that dinosaur oil doesn’t need to be poured into energy to power all those factories that produce all that crap we buy from china.
Also, OPEC members probably figured out that if they jack up oil prices to a point, Americans will get pissed off enough that they seriously start to consider alternative energies, and there are just enough talented people in the U.S. of A to actually pull that off if it really came to that.
