Yet they attract so much attention for other very rational reasons. First, we’re still adjusting to a world of volatile gas prices. From World War II to the mid-1970s, the overall U.S. economy was largely insulated from the rest of the world. Our exports and imports were a small part of most businesses, and gas prices, which were carefully managed by complex government controls, barely budged. (In inflation-adjusted terms, they actually fell.) As the massive cars of the time attest, Americans didn’t need to think about the global supply or demand of oil. Even after the oil shocks in the 1970s, prices went up by what now seems like a trivial amount.

While sustained high gas prices would certainly produce some turmoil, so would potential spikes in countless other globally traded commodities. But there’s a reason populist outcries don’t start around soybean prices or magnesium spikes. Oil is the only volatile commodity that most Americans deal with directly: we are buffered from most other price swings by our relative wealth. Unlike people in poor countries, consumers here don’t generally buy raw commodity foods; we buy our meals processed or prepared. There’s about a nickel’s worth of corn in each box of Corn Flakes, but Kellogg’s doesn’t adjust the price of its cereal every hour to follow global supply and demand. (Though it has raised the price slowly over time to reflect the rising price of corn.) With most goods, the commodity price has even less impact on cost. “When people buy a phone,” Kilian says, “they don’t buy the copper that makes the wiring.”

With gas, though, hurtling prices are unavoidable. Every day, U.S. drivers pay a price determined by forces all over the world that are hard to understand and harder for the United States to control. Even if we invested in better refineries and exploited every possible energy source, from the Keystone pipeline to the Alaskan wilderness, the impact could be minimal. It could eventually lower prices at the pump — but only if nothing else affects them, like OPEC lowering its production to drive prices back up again. The price of oil is, of course, affected by hundreds of interrelated factors.

“The folks on the right say: ‘Drill here! Drill, drill, drill!’ But that will not impact the global price of oil,” says Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. “How do I know? Because we had this great experiment for seven years where our dependence on oil declined from 60 percent to 45 percent. We import much less percentage-wise than we did 10 years ago. What happened to the price of oil? It doubled.” And the left, Luft says, isn’t offering any better solution. “When they talk about solar and wind and things like that, it’s like applying Prozac to a cancer patient,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the problem.”