By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
Fill up a delivery truck this week and you'll feel it: the price of diesel has hit an all-time high.
Two wars are doing the pushing. Fighting tied to Iran has rattled energy markets broadly, and Ukraine's strikes on Russian refineries have knocked out chunks of the processing capacity that turns crude into the diesel fuel trucks, trains, ships, farm equipment and backup generators run on. Refined-fuel markets are tighter and jumpier than the price of crude oil alone would suggest.
Diesel isn't like gasoline, a cost mostly felt at the pump by drivers. It's the fuel of the supply chain itself — the trucks hauling groceries to the store, the freight trains, the combines in the field, the cargo ships. When diesel gets more expensive, that cost doesn't stay with the trucking company. It moves down the chain, folded into shipping surcharges, then into wholesale prices, then eventually into the number on the shelf tag.
That matters for anyone watching inflation numbers this year, and it matters even more for the small operators — independent truckers, family farms — who don't have the scale to absorb a fuel-cost spike the way a logistics giant might.
How long the record prices last depends on factors well outside any single company's control: the durability of the Iran conflict, the pace and success of Ukrainian strikes on Russian refining capacity, and how quickly alternative supply can fill the gap. None of that is knowable in advance, and we won't pretend otherwise.
Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by NPR News.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."