Diesel Prices Have Soared More Than 60% in the Past Year

So here's the deal: diesel just blew past a price nobody's ever seen before. The CBS News piece reports that the national average for a gallon of diesel hit $5.98 on Thursday — up 61% from $3.71 a year ago — and GasBuddy says it's already crossed $6. That's not a typo. Diesel is now more expensive, relatively speaking, than it's been in modern history.

Why should you care if you don't even drive a diesel truck? Because almost everything you buy rode on one to get to you. Diesel powers the trucks, trains, and heavy equipment that move goods around the country — plus a huge chunk of farming and construction. When diesel gets more expensive, it doesn't stay diesel's problem for long. The Department of Labor already flagged that more than a third of last month's jump in wholesale goods prices came from rising diesel costs, which climbed 24.1% in August alone. Translation: businesses are starting to eat these costs, and eventually some of that gets passed down to you at the store.

So what's driving this? A few things are colliding at once. The big one is the ongoing war involving Iran, which has choked off global oil supply and sent Brent crude (the international price benchmark) jumping to $108 a barrel as fighting escalated. On top of that, there's a squeeze on refining capacity — the plants that actually turn crude oil into usable diesel — in both the Middle East and Russia. Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out a chunk of Russia's ability to refine oil, which piles even more pressure onto an already tight global supply.

The article notes experts think this isn't a blip — one told CBS News that higher diesel prices are something households will likely have to deal with for the rest of the year. And it's already rippling outward: other reporting shows truckers straining under razor-thin profit margins, farmers facing thousands of extra dollars in fuel costs right at harvest time, and even diesel theft becoming more common as the fuel gets more valuable to steal.

The bottom line for you: even if you never pump diesel yourself, expect grocery bills, shipping fees, and the cost of anything trucked or shipped to you to creep up in the coming months. It won't necessarily be a huge jump on any single item, but a lot of small increases stacked across a lot of goods add up.