Gasoline prices have risen over the last three months, as drivers know all too well. This has sparked public outcry against “Big Oil,” Democratic calls for stricter energy standards and more subsidies for “alternative energy,” and Republican vows to “Drill, baby, drill” in pursuit of “energy independence.”

None of those developments should come as a surprise. They happen every spring.[1]

There’s a simple reason for the springtime price spike: oil companies are changing the configuration of their refineries. Refineries—which basically are part pressure cooker and part distillery—separate the idiosyncratic mixture of chemicals we call “oil” into simpler, more useful chemical mixtures like gasoline and diesel fuel. In the spring, oil companies reconfigure the refineries so they produce less heating oil and more motor fuel. They also produce specific blends of gasoline, required by federal law, that create less pollution in the summer’s hot temperatures. Those reconfiguration outages temporarily weaken the supply of gasoline.

Gas and oil come to market through auctions. When there’s a supply shortage, wholesale gas prices get bid up and retail prices at the pump rise accordingly. Voila—the annual springtime price spike, which can be made worse if other factors—like storms or war—are affecting world supplies. If all goes well, most refineries are back online by late spring and gas prices moderate—until the summer driving season starts and heavy consumer demand pushes prices upward again. Drivers don’t get a real break until fall, when (after another reconfiguration cycle), refiners switch to making cheaper “winter blend” gasoline and bad weather reduces people’s driving.

The annual gas price cycle is the simple product of changes in supply and demand over the course of a year. It’s no different than the annual price cycles for sweet corn and cantaloupes, or beach hotel rooms and red roses. Yet, unlike beach hotels and sweet corn, gas spikes spark wild conspiracy theories among the public and crazy policy ideas among politicians.

For instance, during price spikes people often complain about the heavy profits made by one particular oil company, Exxon-Mobil. Those criticisms are directed at the wrong company. Remember that gas and oil come to market through auctions. When the bidding is heavy, higher-cost producers set the market price while lower-cost producers make handsome profits. Exxon-Mobil is legendary for both its pencil-pushing efficiency and its engineering prowess, so the company has good profit margins. If its rivals had similar costs, Exxon-Mobil’s profits would be lower. So blame the competitors for their higher costs, not Exxon-Mobil.

A wild policy idea that usually pops up during price spikes is that the United States needs to become “energy independent” so that unfriendly Middle Eastern nations can’t threaten an oil embargo. Yet, two-thirds of the oil consumed in the United States comes from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, while less than 12 percent comes from the Middle East.[2] So unless Washington goes to war with Ottawa or Mexico City, there isn’t much threat from an oil embargo.

American energy independence also would do little to lower the price of gas. Because oil and gasoline are traded on a world market, the U.S. price would roughly equal the world price regardless of whether all U.S.-consumed oil was produced here at home. The only price benefit from increased U.S. oil production would be because it would increase the world oil supply, not because the United States would be “energy independent.”

Perhaps the wildest idea is that the world is about to run out of oil, causing global misery. The first dire predictions of a permanent global oil shortage were sounded in the 1870s (yes, the 19^th century) by American geologist John Strong Newberry.[3] Those alarms have been repeated every couple decades or so ever since. In 1973, the U.S. State Department warned “the wolf is here” and in 1979 Jimmy Carter solemnly announced that oil wells were “drying up all over the world”; 11 years ago, the New York Times claimed that “oil reserves are expected to dwindle in the decades ahead.” Yet, year after year, the world discovers and produces more and more oil.[4]

Perhaps someday, oil sources will slow. But that decline will likely be because people have moved on to new energy sources—just like we previously moved on from coal, water, wood and wind as our main energy sources. In the meantime, we should be more concerned about legitimate problems with oil use—such as its environmental effects—rather than conspiracy theories and politicians’ wild ideas.

Thomas A. Firey is a senior fellow with the Maryland Public Policy Institute and a Washington County native.