On Friday, the price of diesel fuel technically broke a new record as it surged to a national average of $5.82 per gallon for the first time. But what does all of this mean? You might not drive a diesel car or truck, so the green number on the gas station sign might seem irrelevant. However, much of the world relies on diesel, even if your car itself does not, and the consequences of higher diesel prices are already trickling down to you. Here’s what you might spend more on right now.
My use of “technically” in the headline and in the lede is intentional. The last record, which was a national average of $5.82, was set in May 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine. While today’s number is larger on paper as reported by the American Automobile Association, once you account for inflation, the 2022 record would be similar to $6.65 today. Another time when the price of diesel was technically higher was in 2008, when the national average price of diesel for the year was $3.80 per gallon. Today, that would be about $6.01 per gallon.
However, such technicalities don’t really matter to the businesses and the regular people who now have to open their wallets even wider during a time when prices are already high. It would be easy to dismiss these elevated prices as the driver of a gasoline-burning car. The national average for gasoline is $4.14 per gallon right now. But because of how the diesel market works, it’s not just the owners of Volkswagen TDIs, semi-tractors, and pickup trucks who feel the pain. When the price of diesel blasts off into the stratosphere, everyone can feel the pain – including gas burners.
Diesel Is Involved In So Much Of Your Life
As I wrote at the end of August, diesel is the fuel that moves the world.
The majority of the large vehicles that deliver goods, from semi-trucks and trains to ships and straight trucks, are powered by diesel. A single semi-tractor may burn more than 14,000 gallons of fuel a year delivering the goods that stock the shelves in your local grocery and department stores, your Amazon packages, and even the gasoline you burn in your car. A single driver may cover more than 100,000 miles in a year while doing their part to keep America running. Trucks move roughly 70 percent of all freight in America, and according to the Department of Agriculture, trucks handle 83 percent of America’s produce and 92 percent of its dairy products. Collectively, the trucking industry guzzles some 36.5 billion gallons of diesel per year.
Last year, the national average price for diesel in America was $3.70 per gallon. If you owned a rig or a fleet of them and each truck burned 14,000 gallons, that would equate to $51,800 in fuel costs alone. At today’s new record price, that’s $82,900 just to drive an existing truck down the road burning the same number of gallons as before, not counting insurance, maintenance, repairs, or anything else.
What this means is simple: It is now more expensive to move the same loads the same distance. Diesel is also the fuel of farming, construction, mining, and, for some vanlifers, a source of heat. All of those people also have to spend more money to do the same thing they’ve always done before. Truckers also don’t have the choice to just reduce their mileage as a car owner might. Loads still have to be delivered, no matter the cost of diesel. A trucking company, farmer, or owner-operator that cannot weather the storm of paying tens of thousands more for fuel may go out of business entirely.
High Diesel Prices Can Make Your Food More Expensive
Businesses may choose to eat higher transportation costs for some time, but others do not. As the New York Times writes, distributors eventually begin to pass the higher costs down. A chicken farm in Walterboro, South Carolina, had to add a $5 fuel surcharge to the meat that it ships out to homes and to restaurants. It’s not just farms, either, but major companies involved in food distribution like Sysco, U.S. Foods, and the Performance Food Group. All of them have fuel surcharges.
The New York Times provides another example with UNFI. When diesel was $3.80 per gallon, its surcharge was $35. When diesel hit $5.38 per gallon earlier this year, UNFI’s surcharge was $65.
The fuel crunch can also be seen in imported produce like berries and pineapples. Imported produce is often hauled great distances by trucks that refrigerate their trailers by burning diesel. It’s a similar deal with seafood, which also gets trucked from far-flung places in refrigerated trailers that burn diesel. As diesel gets more expensive, so do all of these items. The spike in diesel prices is one reason why your grocery bill continues to rise.
According to the Independent Grocers Alliance, a group representing 7,500 grocers around the world, every 10 percent rise in fuel costs can translate to food prices rising by 2 to 3 percent. Fuel alone, Independent Grocers Alliance says, is responsible for about 15 percent to 30 percent of the cost of food. This group also notes that the average grocer might get two cents for every dollar spent by a customer, so they can only eat so much of the costs. At the same time, you might buy fewer or cheaper groceries if your bill is more expensive. It’s a delicate balance.
Don’t think it’s just your grocery bill that takes the hit, either. As the Associated Press reported earlier this year, the United States Postal Service, Amazon, FedEx, and the United Parcel Service also tack fuel surcharges onto shippers. Amazon added a 3.5 percent surcharge to third-party sellers while the USPS added an 8 percent surcharge to products like Priority Mail.
Why Diesel Is Getting More Expensive
As for why all of this is happening, the short version is that continued conflicts in the Middle East and Russia are constricting the world’s supply of diesel. Here’s what the New York Times previously reported:
To understand why diesel prices are rising, it’s important to understand the big picture. There is simply not enough diesel available to meet the world’s needs.
Refineries produce diesel, gasoline, jet fuel, and other fuels by “cracking,” or heating, crude oil. The United States and China have most of the world’s refining capacity, followed by countries like Russia and India. But Russia’s ability to make diesel has been severely hamstrung because Ukraine has damaged many of its refineries. In July, Bank of America analysts said Russian refineries were processing around 3.9 million barrels per day, down from 5.3 million barrels a year ago. That has forced Russia to suspend diesel exports. “We estimate that now 40 percent of Russian refining capacity has been impacted by drone strikes,” said Debnil Chowdhury, who tracks the refining business for S&P Global. “And the reason that that’s important is it’s a global market.”
The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which about a fifth of the world’s crude oil is shipped, has also limited the flow of crude oil, diesel and other petroleum products. As a result, the global oil price has climbed around 20 percent, to about $86 a barrel. The volume of crude oil refined in the Middle East has dropped to about eight million barrels a day in 2026, down 1.6 million barrels a day from 2025 levels, S&P Global analysts said in an Aug. 1 report. U.S. refineries have made up for some of that shortfall by operating at around 97 percent of their capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. Exports of diesel and related fuels are up by around 28 percent compared with last year and U.S. inventories of those fuels have fallen sharply.
As of today, the price of diesel is now 55 percent higher than it was before the war started.
The good news is that it can take time for fuel shocks to meander their way through the supply chain, so I wouldn’t expect to go to a grocery store today and see an immediate difference in the price of a cut of salmon.
All of this means that, even though you are not personally filling up your vehicle with diesel, you are still paying more, anyway. If you’re interested in reading why there are no quick ways to lower the price of diesel, click here to read my previous story. But the short version is that, unlike gasoline, diesel cannot be cut with increasing amounts of ethanol and, due to how diesel is produced, refineries can’t easily crank out more diesel.
Unfortunately, the ongoing situation in the Middle East means that the price of diesel fuel may continue to rise. So, buckle up and batten down the hatches. We are not out of this yet and may not be for some time. If you’ve seen increased prices in your daily life, how are you handling it? Are you driving less or buying different groceries?
Top graphic images: DespositPhotos.com; Mercedes Streeter
As one of the many new englanders who heat with diesel (home heating oil is effectively the same base product) I’m going to freeze this winter.
Is propane an option?
I have long championed for people in your situation building home generators that use Prius technology. The combined waste heat from a Prius engine I estimate is about the same as a heater sufficient to keep a 1600sqft house warm through a Minnesota winter.
But there’s no time for that now.
A generator that can run on propane OTOH is less efficient than even regular car engines. Which means about 85% of the energy of the propane is thrown away as waste heat (vs 60% for the Prius) so it makes an even better generator of heat than electricity for a given amount of fuel. A resourceful New Englander might figure out a way to harness most of that waste heat into the house HVAC while ducting 100% of the dangerous exhaust gasses outside. That would give you a second source of power and hear and probably a third source of heat if the fuel oil and firewood are no longer options.
It wouldn’t be enough to replace the main heater but it would be enough to keep you and yours alive and with power through an emergency if the propane tank is big enough.
Piped natural gas would work to but only if you had it which, given you’re heating with fuel oil, I think you don’t. Gasoline would also work if it’s reserved for extreme emergencies. Maybe even alcohols if the generator is built for its use.
Another factor is the role China has played in this.
Its reserves at the start of the US and Israeli war on Iran were the equivalent to a small Opec producing country’s annual exports.
Which has kept Chinese petrol and diesel prices relatively low, and allowed China to sell some reserves for a tidy profit to neighbours.
But it also wants to keep the same reserves, and so is also buying a lot.
Plus they read the newspapers and know when to make things embarrassing for people who have often been rude about them..
There is also the arbitrage between diesel and Jet A — it is relatively easy for refineries to switch from one to the other.
Now peak flying to lie on a beach on the other side of the world which looks just like a beach at home season has gone, more diesel will be produced, especially as some airlines are cutting winter flying schedules by lots.
But not enough to make up for the 20% shortfall.
Buckle up, it is going to get worse.
Knock knock
Whose there?
Natural gas.
…….
That’s the joke.
*FWER-r-r-r-r-r-T*
Actually,
Natural gas has about 130 octane rating. So it doesn’t knock.
(I will let myself out.)
It used a small amount of diesel as a door knocker. ;p
Good one
Hah! That stock photo of the Chevron sign is near where I live. Just for grins, as of yesterday (9/4/26), the pricing on that sign was:
Regular: $5.999/gallon
Plus: $6.199/gallon
Supreme $6.399/gallon
and:
Diesel: $8.299/gallon
Ouch!
Ha, I used to live not super far from there too!
I have no idea how an O/O makes any money these days. This is preposterous.
“unlike gasoline, diesel cannot be cut with increasing amounts of ethanol”
This part is not exactly true. Ethanol and diesel blends just need a cosolvent.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45252-7
So I clicked and started reading, and immediately looked up TBP assuming it had some sort of nasty hazardous downside. Sure enough, the wikipedia has a “hazards” section. Let’s see what it says..
“In contact with concentrated nitric acid the TBP-kerosene solution forms hazardous and explosive red oil.”
..oh. Yeah, uh.. keeping concentrated nitric acid away from most things is probably a good plan in general. Especially anything organic. Not adding concentrated nitric acid to your diesel tank continues to be a good idea with or without TBP.
You are too focused on the exact chemical and not that the purpose of that experiment was to get ethanol content above 40%, which is crazy high.
Here is another paper, and in the discussion:
“Krishna et al. (2019) proved that E5B17 (5% ethanol, 17% biodiesel, and 78% diesel by volume) fuel is an optimal blend ratio to achieve physical and chemical properties, combustion and emission characteristics similar to diesel.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352484721014499
E20B10 (20% ethanol 10% biodiesel) had pretty good results in this experiment.
We’re using our Rav4 Plug-in hybrid for daily driving around town as intended, plugging in when range gets low (overnight). We’re gettting about 50 miles range which lasts several days. Our kid is using our Prius to go to school an hour and a half away instead of his Subaru due to the much higher MPG of the Prius.
“Our kid is using our Prius to go to school an hour and a half away instead”
Yikes! That’s really cutting into homework time.
It’s a late afternoon/evening metal sculpture class, so totally optional and for fun. Besides the drive home goes by an Afghan? Kabob and Burger place in Colfax CA that serves delicious food!
Gotcha!
I wonder how many of the people who drive diesel light-duty and heavy-duty pickups voted Republican in the last election.
And whether any of them will admit they could have chosen better.
So much winning. I just can’t stand it.
Better really wasn’t on the table. It was a scenario of pick your poison. Either way, you’re getting poison, like it or not, regardless of how or even if you vote. You can compare them and debate which is worse all you want, but it doesn’t change that both are poison.
The silver lining on this dark cloud is that so many people are waking up and seeing this country for what it actually is and has been for many decades: a corporate police state pretending to be a democracy. Better late than never.
> Better really wasn’t on the table. It was a scenario of pick your poison. Either way, you’re getting poison
That’s preposterous. No other candidate in the past 100 years, dead or alive, from any party, would have made enemies of longtime allies, curtailed established civil rights, and threatened to annex Greenland and Canada.
FDR. Johnson. Reagan. Bush Jr. Those negative outcomes applied to those former presidents with the exception of trying to annex Greenland and Canada. FDR gave us concentration camps for US citizens of Japanese descent, arresting reporters that were against WWII, and the creation of the OSS which unconstitutionally spied on US citizens and were the roots of multiple future intelligence agencies that expanded said spying. Johnson gave us false pretenses to get us into war and forced enslavement of American citizens to fight said war based on false pretenses by calling a draft, while various connected captains of industry handsomly profited from said war and the suffering and deaths of US citizens forced into a violent situation against their will under threat of imprisonment, nevermind all of the foreigners injured/killed/mutilated/deformed as a result of that. Reagan gave us government piss inspectors placed between US citizens and a job while the courts pretended compliance was “voluntary” to sidestep the obvious 4th amendment implications, a massive expansion of prisons, invasive technologies designed to erode individual privacy and autonomy, an overly-bureaucratized legal system designed to maximize the amount of people forced into said prison system, and the largest expansion ever of government into the lives of the American people after telling everyone he was for less government and that the 9 most dangerous words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Bush Jr. gave us all of the post 911 civil liberties erosions and mass surveillance leading to today’s turnkey totalitarian state, all of which was further expanded by subsequent administrations, regardless of whether they had a D or R next to their name. The orange-thing being in power and having access to some of the controls of said turnkey totalitarian state is really the logical extension of all of this, and shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.
The attempt to annex Greenland/Canada is probably theatre on the orange thing’s part to distract from his role in the Epstein files, and aside from that, such annexation was planned by the intelligence agency scumbags and military-industrial complex multiple decades before the orange-thing was even in the picture. The orange thing is the puppet, not the puppeteer. He could croak today, and nothing meaningful would change. He’s functionally nothing more than an egregore. With the orange-thing gone, we’d still live in the same shit dystopia. Worse, it might make a certain segment of the population think everything is well, when it isn’t. Vote for the other party, and we’ll still be in the same shit dystopia. The data centers, APLR/facial recognition cameras, and such will continue going up in spite of public will being overwhelmingly against. The mass surveillance will stay in place because the upper 0.1% of the population have too much money riding on it and really hate everyone not of their social-economic caste and would like to kill us off at the first opportunity, but they are patient enough and willing enough to do it instead by poisoning the land, water, and even the food people are feeding to their children instead while the courts shield them from liability, and while they are left free to continue their crimes(which include molesting/trafficking children with the blessing and protection of the intelligence agencies). Lobbyists will continue to determine what laws we are forced to abide by which we won’t even get a vote on, under threat of imprisonment for non-compliance, or death if we refuse imprisonment by logically defending ourselves against those willing to lock us in cages for supposed crimes with no victim, while the unelected aristocracy that rules us is free to commit the most heinous crimes without consequence. For some people, it’s all acceptable when the other party is in power, with no acknowledgement with regard to the circumstances surrounding why the orange-thing was able to come into power and garner a cult following in the first place.
There’s a lot of lessons to be learned, that aren’t being learned. Key among them is that Americans didn’t vote themselves into this place, and it logically follows that they aren’t going to be able to vote themselves out of it. That is why I think this nation’s collapse is inevitable. Grab some popcorn, because it’s going to be a damned good show. Frank Zappa knew what was up.
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
If you haven’t already you really need to read this:
https://archive.org/download/war-is-a-racket-smedley/WAR%20IS%20A%20RACKET%20-%20SMEDLEY_text.pdf
Its a 90 yo compilation of speeches given by someone who was the tip of the spear long before FDR took office. He was (supposedly) the top choice of a cabal of powerful American industrialists with a fetish for facism to replace FDR as a puppet dictator after a coup. He turned them in instead but of course the FBI investigation yielded insufficient evidence to prosecute. He rails against exactly the same things you are.
I’ll warn you its a depressing read knowing how the rest of the 20th century played out.
You might also like Paris 1919. The book was adapted for TV, now on Youtube:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BjmpMY22lqg
It shows the how and why that peace accord carefully set it all the dominoes for the rest of the 20th century too. Its main flaw IMO is that it has the benefit of hindsight which bleeds heavily into the foreshadowing.
I read “War is a Racket” almost 3 decades ago.
Still, FDR compromised with the fascists, was an authoritarian himself, and the fascists STILL tried to do a coup against him because they didn’t get every thing they wanted and the little people actually got something out of the deal that gave them leverage for a change. That leverage is what allowed the anomalous middle class to come into existence during the post WWII era, and is long gone today.
Most modern liberals do not understand that fascists always play dirty. Fascists aren’t willing to compromise in good faith, and will see your willingness to compromise with them in good faith as weakness, while doing everything they can to undo said compromises, even if they must patiently do so over the course of a century. The orange-thing is teaching many lessons on this that people refuse to learn while they simultaneously look on in horror.
Its my understand the reason for those Japanese internment camps was because many Japanese heritage residents in south America had been exposed as spies who sent the sailing times of beef shipments to Britain to the Japanese embassy, who forwarded them to the German embassy and eventually to the U boats laying in wait. American shipping to Europe was also getting hammered by U boats right off the shores of America because of similar spying. That wasn’t just blind luck. Japanese subs were known to be patrolling the west coast of the US so it was feared they would receive similar intel and the US would suffer similar losses.
As draconian as the FBI was in that time (my grandfather HATED the FBI as they were always in his business as a executive on the Ohio Central RR) the FBI did bust several spy rings before they were able to do much damage.
We’d have been better off as a people at the mercy of the foreign spy rings, rather than at the mercy of the domestic FBI, a spy ring much larger in size and scope than anything the foreigners had and deliberately pointed at the American people as a whole, rather than specifically targeting the politically powerful and miliary assets as the foreign spy rings were. No nation is dumb enough to try to invade a country where everyone and their brother and dog all own guns. The Japanese knew this.
We had the option to stay out of it, but we got Pearl Harbor from the Japanese who knew better than to invade, when there’s no shortage of evidence that it could have been prevented, thanks to our own spy rings having advanced warning. There was no need to place the embargo on Japan, and we’d also have likely been left alone had it never happened. Also notice that every time we get a Pearl Harbor style event, popular support for war is at a historical low only to rocket upward after said event, only for the population to soon be stripped of yet more civil liberties via emergency powers, told the emergency powers are temporary, but the emergency powers mostly remain permanent even after the conflict is long over, even after a claimed victory in said conflict?
It’s an established pattern. There’s probably a new Pearl Harbor coming our way soon. The question is whether the masses will fall for it again, or will they realize tha the real enemy is within their own homeland?
I think General Patton learned too late who the real enemy was. Maybe he was killed for realizing it only for it to be made to look like his death was the result of an accident. Fascists will do ANYTHING to increase their power and control.
The Japanese did not just attack Pearl harbor. They attacked the Philippines and other US holdings too. They took American prisoners. Their goal was very clear to take over the entire Pacific region. Germany also declared war on the US shortly after. Staying out of the war was NOT an option.
Japan also did not ever expect the United States to be able to directly threaten the home islands. They were wrong. We bombed Tokyo within a couple of month doing very little physical damage. In retaliation they slaughtered a quarter of a million Chinese citizens merely on suspicion of helping the pilots of that raid. And they were even less charitable to the captured pilots. The Japanese Army of 1937-1945 were monsters.
As to us knowing the Japanese were planning an attack that is partially true. We had broken the codes, we read the mail but the devil was in the details. The attack was suspected to be coordinated with subterfuge on the airfields which is why the aircraft were clustered together rather than being spread out as for an air raid. The clustering greatly magnified the damage from the air raid. The Americans were also not expecting torpedoes in the shallow water of the harbor. We knew the fleet was at sea but not where or exactly when the attack would happen. Furthermore it wasn’t even supposed to be a sneak attack. Japan had intended to deliver the declaration of war a few hours before the attack but translation difficulties delayed the declaration from being delivered till after. America didn’t fail intentionally.
“No nation is dumb enough to try to invade a country where everyone and their brother and dog all own guns. The Japanese knew this”
Which is why they planned to use biological warfare to soften the US beforehand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
That was one of the more notorious of many such units. It worked too as the deaths of 200k Chinese civilians proved.
Wow, thanks for posting that. Despite multiple history classes and WW2 documentaries I have never come across that the Japanese were conducting biological warfare and human experiments. I knew the Nazis did but it seems like Japan hasn’t been criticized enough in popular history for what they have done.
No wonder China has so much animosity towards even modern day Japan.
I think the reason for that is many of Germany’s leaders were tried at Nuremburg for all the world to see and ordinary Germans near the camps were forced to confront what had literally been happening in their own backyards. This meant German crimes were better documented.
Japan’s crimes however were less exposed to the rest of the world and the atomic bombings gave it the pretense of victimhood allowing it to remain in deep, deep denial about it’s even nastier past. I’ve even heard tales of school textbooks that to this day only have a couple of pages on the war which mention only the most basic places and dates and end in some form of: ‘then one day the United States dropped two atomic bombs on us for no reason!’ Most of east Asia who suffered under Japanese rule still remember though and still carry animosity.
There are many YouTube videos and other newer documentaries that discuss some of what Japan did though.
And yet, sane options were right there to be chosen but America chose that lifelong, lying dickhead instead. I don’t even particularly like Democrats but the idea that they are still part of the “two sides, same thing” and are the same as voting for Republicans is absurd on every level. There are two distinct sides now: Fascists and non-fascists.
Fascists support the merger of corporation and state, imperialism abroad, a national security state, mass surveillance, curtailment of civil liberties, expansion of prisons coupled with an obsession for “law and order”, ect. The option to vote against it at the Federal level in politics generally hasn’t been on the table for the entirity of my life, and I’m approaching 50. Voting “D” for the most part still means you’re voting fascist, just a different flavor of it than if you vote “R”. The “D” type fascism puts the velvet glove back on the proverbial iron fist, and little else. The orange-thing is a culmination of a decades’ long effort by moneyed interests to strip this country of everything that made it a desirable place to live for the lower classes, and that effort won’t stop once he’s out of the picture, nor will the “D” party reverse his most egregious abuses if they get back into power and continue their existing track record. Recall how nothing ever happened during the shift from Bush Jr. to Obama to end “enhanced interrogation techniques”, ban waterboarding, shut down secret CIA black sites, and increase government transparency, all in spite of the “hope and change” president’s promises.
Without accountability for the people in power, nothing will change. The entire government we live under, regardless of who is (s)elected into power, is designed to prevent the most powerful/rich in society from being held to account for their crimes. This means that the American people are going to have to do that themselves, and the entire mass-surveillance apparatus, war on terrorism, national security state, ect. exists to prevent them from ever doing that. I’m also certain the vast majority of both ‘D’ or ‘R’ voters did NOT vote for this mess we are in either. Many ‘R’ voters voted for the orange-thing because his rhetoric was the least war-mongering of the two candidates, and his track record from his first term showed him to be the least war-like president since Carter. I wasn’t fooled and didn’t vote for him. His second term? The worst war-mongering president we’ve ever had.
Just remember this: the purpose of a system is what it does. America is a system, and it is always prudent to ask what it is doing. The orange-thing is just a small piece of said system, and easily replaced with a part of similar function. The system will keep doing what it does. The only way to stop it is something drastic to interrupt its function, and that’s not by voting in a replacement part…
They’re in denial. They bought the lie about Iran, and it’s “worth it” and “still not as high as under Biden”.
The silver lining in all this is that this should be a big incentive for buyers of commerical trucks to give a more serious look at electric commercial trucks and put them into use where feasible.
Same deal with transit agencies. City buses are a prime candidate for switching to electric.
The transit agency in my area pretty much no longer operates fully diesel buses, aside from long-haul double deckers and a handful of oddballs from about a decade ago. Every other bus is either CNG, electric, or diesel-electric hybrid, with the mini shuttles being gas/E85 flex fuel (one driver told me they usually fill them with E85). Pretty much all of their non-bus vehicles are also powered by fuels other than diesel, save for their commuter rail locomotives, ferries, and a few trucks that probably only came in diesel.
My hometown in Maine long since stopped buying diesel buses and less than heavy-duty trucks (aka 3-axle snow plows). The acquisition and maintenance costs of diesel started outweighing the fuel savings years ago. They have no interest in spending the capital cost to go electric for any of that, none of them drive enough miles for it to pay – and too many electric buses have been disasters anyway.
“. They have no interest in spending the capital cost to go electric for any of that, none of them drive enough miles for it to pay – and too many electric buses have been disasters anyway.”
I recall in the mid to late 2000s when the first hybrid diesel buses came out, they were a bit of a disaster too… at least the ones the Toronto Transit Comission bought from Orion Bus. Orion bus stupidly equipped their early hybrids with lead-acid batteries… and had to start replacing them all after a year or so of use in most cases.
But then they got better and the diesel-electrics from the 2010s and on have been solid.
Same deal with the full electric buses. The early ones the TTC bought for their electric bus test fleet (a total of 60 buses split between BYD, Proterra and New Flyer) around 2020 had LOTS of issues.
BYD sucked the worst. Proterra went bankrupt. And New Flyer was the ‘least worst’ of the 3.
And since then, the TTC bought 300 more electric buses that arrived between 2024 and 2026… two thirds are an improved New Flyer design, one third from Nova Bus and no sales for BYD.
Things might change for BYD if they get more serious about quality and start building locally. There is talk of them buying the Stellantis plant in Brampton Ontario.
“They have no interest in spending the capital cost to go electric for any of that, none of them drive enough miles for it to pay”
It depends on how many miles and the cost of diesel. And with the recent cost of diesel and with more transit agencies buying improved electric buses, it’s just a question of when, not if they reconsider buying electric buses.
But yeah… going electric also means they’ll have to build out charging infrastructure. The TTC built out an overhead charging system that they tested with their initial 60 bus test fleet that all the recently purchased buses have.
https://www.ttc.ca/news/2023/April/TTC-and-PowerON-unveil-innovative-eBus-charging-system
I predict that eventually, all city buses will be electric. And not just for fuel cost reasons, but also for maintenance costs.
The town is only ~20 square miles. None of their vehicles travel enough miles to be worth spending any more money on to save a relative pittance in fuel. As I have said, they don’t even buy diesels anymore other than special cases And electricity is expensive enough in Maine that the savings isn’t as much as you might think to start with. The only way they would do it is if EVs got massively cheaper to buy than gasoline vehicles, and that is not happening anytime soon, especially at the scale of a bus. The gas buses saved WAAAY more on maintenance and repairs than they cost in added fuel (plus being $15K-20K cheaper up front – that pays for a LOT of maintenance) – and that was before the price of diesel went mental. Modern gas engines need very, very little maintenance.
This is literally a YMMV issue. A city bus that is running 20+ hours a day is a VERY different proposition than a school bus that is used 2 hours a day in a very small (but very wealthy so they have their own schools). One run in the morning, one run in the afternoon, mostly sits all day in-between. The kept a couple of big diesel pushers for field trips and sports team use. Those are the only buses that get any miles put on them.
As an Owner Operator, electric is not feasible.
If by Owner-Operator you mean for long-haul trucking, I can see why you’d think that.
But for short-haul, electric trucks would work fine… and already are for a growing number of companies.
Pushing fleets to electric. Usfoods and Sysco are experimenting. Both with hybrid electric reefers and electric trucks. It’s going to be a much bigger problem in the developing world where options are limited.
When reality and your world view aren’t in alignment, denying reality instead of adjusting your world view just makes you look like an idiot. When a nation starts passing laws and shaping policy on the basis of such a rigid world view and in defiance of reality the consequences are far more dire, as is now being so aptly demonstrated to the great humiliation of the US.
We converted from Oil Heat to Natural Gas and an Electric Heat pump the year after Putin invaded Ukraine. Our Oil bill jumped to between $1800 and $2000 per fill-up. That was monthly.
Luckily, the gas line was finally extended to our street that summer. My NG bill never exceeds about $350 in the depth of winter and electricity is still at a good price. (Ontario).
As for food, my wife got into a kick during Covid to start canning. We have family with a farm that raises a cow and pig for us. I have 3 freezers in the garage and 300 sf of shelving with Mason jars on them. (we are out of space).
I hit the grocery store for milk, etc. and look at the price of things and just say no.
Damn… my gas cost is never above about $350 for the month keeping the house at 68F or so.
How the hell big a house do you have that your oil bill was $2000/mo!? Are you keeping the place at a temp suitable for growing orchids? A 1940s furnace? My place in Maine, even with the current run up in heating oil, the oil contract this year is $2500 (lower of contract price or market, so could be lower, but I am not holding my breath). For the entire year, and that includes hot water year-round, which is off the oil furnace. Is heating oil THAT much more expensive north of the border?
I will admit that 20 years ago I replaced all the windows and installed a super-efficient new Biasi furnace with a vacuum bottle hot water tank, and cut our oil consumption by 2/3rds. We literally used a full 250ga tank of oil just over the summer heating water with the old system (1940s coal furnace converted to oil, so pretty much a worst-case scenario). But when I bought the place in 2001, oil was $.70/gal, split three ways with my housemates, so we really didn’t care. I lucked out and did the heating system upgrade just before the price of oil tripled, and it’s just gone up from there. But I have done the math on heat pumps, and absent solar too it doesn’t pay to do it. And solar doesn’t pay while it’s a mainly a rental property.
The house is about 2800 sf. A Frame style, so minimal attic insulation. Windows are older. Furnace was original to the house (1978). It was about a tank of fuel oil a month. We are in Canada. 900 litre tank @ $2/l or more.
We do like the house warm, so it is typically 71 or 72 daytime and 65 night time.
Yikes – the most we have ever paid is half that. But similar house other than I replaced the windows, then years later when I had it sided I had a lot of insulation added and replaced, and had the house wrapped and 2IN of foam put under the new metal roof. That made a good bit of difference too.
My new house in FL is super-insulated – R60 walls, R80 roof. I expect it to cost about nothing to keep cool. Heat isn’t really a thing here – I turned on the heat two nights last year in my old house. I expect the computers, me, and the cat will be enough heat to keep the new house warm all winter.
Mexican spicy pickled carrots are my favorite way to eat carrots. Just peel and slice carrots into rounds and place into a jar with slices of jalapeno (or the contents of a can of pre-sliced jalapenos) and fill with a vinegar solution. Sterilization is not needed as the carrots ferment as well.
Highly recommended.
F*** D***** T**** **** * [redacted].
Sorry, that came out wrong. What I meant to say was “Golly!”
You could have also said Fuuuudge…
It’s all rather frustrating to have to dance around the facts in order to mollycoddle the world’s biggest baby. This was a self-inflicted dick-stepping because the current tenant of the white house needed a distraction from his latest crime. And instead of being mad about getting dragged another forever war, an army of parrots will come in and say “we’ve been at war with Iran since 19-dickety-three, or, “but the nuke-yu-lers!” because facts mean nothing to authoritarians and standards are only a cudgel to be used against their enemies, but never themselves.
I’ll take my timeout now.
Many congratulations to the Trump administration for breaking a new fuel price record!
I’d like to thank the war in Ukraine, my war in Iran, and the overthrow of Venezuela for these record high prices. We are making money hand over fist.
I’m fortunately fully plumbed and use natural gas for for heat, but much of New England and the Mid-Atlantic relys on trucked in heating oil. This is going to KILL their annual budgets.
Not to say natural gas is not going up, it is. But paying a monthly bill VS filling an empty storage tank one time…
Lets just hope it’s a mild winter for them. It’s not going to be pretty otherwise. Especially as many of the houses most effected have questionable electric. Could be lots of house fires as people overload circuits. At least those inferred heaters have gotten cheap and are more efficient with safe guards over the old resistant and oil filled space heaters.
US has tons of natural gas fracking has made even more. But I guess between exports and data center demand it could go up.
Glad you see it too. Gonna be a painful winter for some.
There is no Kennedy with the Venezuelan communist oil this time. Maybe freedom oil Venezuelan oil and another Kennedy will come to peoples rescue.
People need to get into diy mini split heat pumps and solar. The new slim ptac from Mr cool that requires 2, 8″ holes might be an answer too but I think they are still about 3x the price of the Chinese mini split heat pumps.
I’m about to spec out a new HVAC system this autumn. The furnace about kicked it this spring and my AC has barely kept up all summer.
I was on the mini split boat before. Then I lived in Asia for a while and became fully converted. Ducted systems make little sense. For most houses. The only real positive is natural gas heat. My dad installed a heat pump with natural gas furnace in his house probably 25 years ago. I think I would probably do that if I had to replace a ducted system but also probably throw in a few mini splits just for comfort and redundanc.
I’ve experinced mini-splits in AirBnb and such. They seem to work well for the purpose.
My house has full forced air, but does have dead zones.
Sketchy HVAC companies ruin it for everyone. If you don’t do it yourself the goodman test works well. If they don’t like Goodman they aren’t any good. If they say they are fine or work well they are probably fine. Silver soldering linesets is probably the hardest part and they mess that up constantly and use lower temp solder.
At least in Maine, unless you have solar, heat pumps don’t really help. Electricity is just too darned expensive, and the winters are too cold. People mostly do it still because effectively you get central A/C for free, and it’s cheaper to install than a whole new oil heating system. With solar it’s a no-brainer, of course, and helps justify the cost of the panels.
Solar is so cheap now to diy too. I’m a fan of solar canopy. I built one for my sister in Rhode Island. It’s like almost a free roof for a gazebo that can power your house and car. I probably should have done it on my farm but went more solar farm style with jposts and frames that can be angled. Part of that is I wanted to experiment with growing things under the panels.
Ive known a few people that turned tankless hot water heaters in to boilers that seems like a good idea switch to natural gas or lpg. There are some electric units cheap enough you could pumb a few in to use if you had cheap power.
If you own and can swing it, solar is a no-brainer in northern NE even though the climate is far from ideal for it. If I still paid the bills up there, I would have done it years ago. But I don’t, and of course my tenants can’t afford it, or the rent increase that it would require. We did do the math on heat pumps and solar before the Federal credits were nuked, couldn’t do it.
I want solar and battery for the new house here in FL, but it doesn’t make sense here to save money on a truly modern house absent things like a pool and an EV or two to suck up the power. I want it for post-hurricane power outages. And rather than rooftop, I will likely go with a couple of “solar generators” with portable solar panels to charge them. They can stay safely indoors when Mother Nature gets bitchy. The new house will be efficient enough to make this easily doable on the relatively cheap. Down here, you can’t even break even on the monthly bill with solar because of course the bought-and-paid-for legislature kowtow’d to FPL. BIG monthly fee just to be connected to the grid, even if you never use any power.
The plug in solar / island mode inverter are making things like that cheap and legal in many states. I think we had about $2500 in to a 4.2kw system and gazebo and Chinese hybrid inverter.
I’ve mainly picked up pallets of panels from a place that deals in them. Shipping is always the killer especially if freight prices are up. You can normally get 320w – 410w panels for $50 to $75 depending on grade. 240w to 270w panels for $25 to $40 depending on grade. But smaller panels for projects like gates or solar generators I’ll buy from eBay or Amazon.
There are some smaller 200w Chinese bi facial panels you can get with free shipping for around $85 last time I looked. Regular 200w were about $70. 100w bi facial around $50. 100w either regular or flexible around $40.
The overwhelming majority of people are not going to be able to DIY solar. And DIY permanently mounted panels WILL run into insurance and county permitting issues where I am.
But for sure if you can DIY, you can save a hell of a lot of money, just like pretty much anything and everything.
States seem to be speed running the patio / plug in / island mode solar thing. So there might be hope.
Definitely not this one – FPL has bought and paid for the legislature.
The Dominion merger might help or blow up and make everything much worse.
There is zero chance that it won’t. But at least electricity here is cheap compared to where I came from, so there is that. Service is excellent too. But they definitely have it in for residential solar.
I say screw the law. I’m putting DIY solar on my quadricycle body. It will power my laptop, stove burner, charge my antique flip phone, run an electric blanket, and charge the bike and its lights, or even allow me to play video games, if I ever find myself having to live out of it.
I’ve been trying to find land that will let me live on a trailer, shack, or even a modest 600 sq ft house off the grid, and it almost doesn’t exist anymore, even 20+ miles from the nearest town. Everywhere requires me to build some obnoxious McMansion monstrousity I don’t want or need, or I’m not allowed to live there, which will require a lifetime debt burden that I do not want to service even though I currently make 6-figures. Fuck that.
It’s all about forcing people into debt to pay interest and maximizing tax revenues generated, while gaslighting everyone into thinking the compliabnce is voluntary, while penalizing people who are homeless as criminals so that they can be funneled into the prison system as slave labor further driving wages down.
Lots of places won’t even let you run your own solar system off grid even if you DO have the knowhow(I’m an electrical engineer and couldn’t legally do this in 90+% of the USA because I don’t have all of the expensive certifications), because they force you to get the blessing of the local utility monopoly first, that will want you to do a grid-tie system with an unfair arrangement designed to needlessly cost you yet more money while favoring the utility company, if they don’t ban you from having a solar power system outright.
It’s all to force you into the workforce. If you don’t agree that is a fair arrangement, there is prison, the military, or death as the alternatives. The upper 0.1% is not ever going to let their tax cattle get off the plantation…
<shrug>
Off grid electricity production and a modest dwelling of little(ideally no) upkeep costs are key tenants to a modern lifestyle of economic minimalism. There are still places where people can pull off that lifestyle without needing much more than a septic tank system and a small piece of land fertile enough to grow food crops and let livestock graze. But some are way more expensive than others, way more polluted than others, or having a more or less hostile climate than others, due to the location’s unique constraints, and the point is to minimize the cost of living. From that metric, both inner-city ghettos and poor, small towns in the midwest USA have good value, but they still keep you tied to bills as part of your living expense, those bills still aren’t all that cheap considering the cost of basic labor, and the food generally available in these neighborhoods within walking distance of one’s dwelling is total ass. So you absolutely need some sort of vehicle to make it work in any case.
I’ve found some promising locations though. Places to go off grid with paid-off property/dwelling/infrastructure, raise food, keep assessed property value(and thus property taxes) low, and if one gets a dividend income built up and uses vehicles that don’t require registration/insurance or a gas station, if in addition to that one can be their own power plant/sewer facility/water supply with whatever is available or built upon their own land, and one might be able to live well as a single person on $500-1,000/mo income all earned without having to work.
With that, one could even travel via bike touring 3-6 months out of the year for not a whole lot more than the cost of food and camping gear. The issue that will make that touring more difficult are all of the new anti-homeless laws that ban sleeping in public places. Following class 2/3 ebike laws when someone’s always looking could still let one cover 200+ miles per riding day. A lot more in places where no one is looking or where it doesn’t matter, as long as there’s somewhere to charge. Solar alone could potentially cover 50-100 miles per riding day at 30 mph coupled with light human pedal input in a vehicle of sufficient streamling, plus any 110V outlet is fair game. A Lohmann engine could be rigged up as a lightweight generator making a continuous ~250W too. But if NONE of that works, you still need to be able to pedal it, and you may not want to if the nearest open hotel is 50 miles away while gaining 2,000 ft of elevation after you haven’t had dinner and there’s nowhere to legally sleep when you are faced with stealth camping being the most rational course of action in spite of what any law says.
Curious why that region persists with fuel oil long after it has died out in most of the country. It is easily double to triple the cost of natural gas.
For those that don’t have natural gas there are heat pumps. Even the cheaper DIY ones like the Mr. Cool brand that M SV mentioned heat down to -22F
Because there is no gas pipeline connecting Maine to the rest of the US – only pipelines to Canada where gas is WAAAAAY more expensive than it is in the rest of the US. The rest of New England is better connected, but gas is still a lot more expensive than in most of the rest of the country, when it’s even available. They never have had the fracking boom up there. Natural gas HAS made inroads in the greater Portland area, but only in some places, it just isn’t widely available. And of course trucked-in NG or Propane is STUPID expensive, and really only useful for cooking and spot heating. I have an NG heater with a big outdoors tank in my garage in Maine, but it’s REALLY expensive to use. I shudder to think what a fillup of that thing costs these days.
Heat pumps don’t save money most of the year in Maine (and likely most of New England). Electricity is too expensive. You save some in the shoulder seasons. Modern heat pumps DO work at low temperatures – but they use a TON of electricity to do it, so what you save on oil you spend on the electric bill (unless you have sufficient solar, of course, but Maine sucks for solar too). For perspective, Florida Power and Light bought up the electrical generating capacity in much of Southern Maine after Maine bought into “deregulation” and forced Central Maine Power to sell off all of thier generation capacity. I pay about the same price for electrons from them in Florida as my tenants do for my house in Maine. But in Florida, FPL delivers them for free. In Maine, you still get to pay CMP MORE for the delivery of them than for the electrons themselves. The theory was that “competition” would lower electricity prices, but reality is you have a choice of expensive, really expensive, or stupidly expensive power, for standard offer, sundry spot market-based offerings (great until you get screwed, maybe), and “green” power offerings.
Heat pumps are still VERY popular because you are getting getting A/C effectively for free, and much more efficiently than old-school window units (and Maine can give Florida a run for it’s money in the summer a surprising amount of the time today), and the installation cost is often a lot lower – especially when you have to bring a chimney and oil tank up to code as part of a new furnace installation (and you do).
So cheaper to run except the dead of winter, more efficient and cheaper than AC in the summer, you don’t have to pay for separate AC, and heat pumps are cheaper than a new oil furnace. I see that there are also rebates up to $9,000 for heat pumps.
These guys say even at $0.26 per kWh a heat pump cost less to run than oil.
https://www.efficiencymaine.com/at-home/heating-cost-comparison/
Overall, it saves some. If you need a new furnace anyway it’s worth it, especially if you care about A/C, which not everyone in Maine does. It’s a no brainer if you also go solar, but that’s a big investment. As usual, because the companies installing them know there are rebates, they jack up the prices accordingly. And most people can’t or won’t DIY. And the rebates don’t apply to rental properties or second homes anyway.
Electricity is significantly more expensive than that once you pay for the delivery and the fees where my house is. This winter, heat pumps will pay off pretty good with the current price of oil, but that has not been the case – oil prices fluctuate far more than electricity prices do.
I was actually pleasantly surprised that the “lesser of this price or market” oil contract for this coming winter for my place in Maine only went up about 15% vs. last year. I was expecting worse, and actually held off increasing rent in expectation of it. Also thankful that my tenants pay it, not me. They keep the place an icebox and it will end up costing about $2200 this year. Electric space heaters in the bedrooms, so having the rest of the house 60F is fine. I also invested years ago in an EXTREMELY efficient oil furnace and thermos bottle water heater setup while I still lived there.
No gas in the neighborhood, and reality is that it’s not much cheaper in Maine even when you can get it. It all comes from Atlantic Canada, where the fracking boom never happened. There is no gas pipeline connecting Maine to the rest of the US. But there is a massive oil pipeline connecting Portland to Montreal – Portland is basically Eastern Canada’s winter oil port. And I am sure Trump’s trade war is making the Canadians think about those facts quite a bit.
I’m also in New England, every winter I’m glad that gas heat was on the list of “must haves” when I was apartment hunting.
I have both a diesel Kubota tractor and my cummins (which I have not been driving as it needs a front alignment) but yeah these prices are ridiculous and going to affect more then just me filling those up. Also would in R&D for a semi truck manufacture we already had a down year last year in sales while this year has surpassingly been better but if diesel prices keep climbing like this I can see a sales slump once again.
Hell, I just have a Kubota BX and the cost to fill it is astonishing. I just use two 5-gallon jerry cans and it’s really weird to pull out of the gas station spending as much for the little tractor fuel as to gas up the pickup I’m in, and that’s with the off-road diesel discount.
I look at the farmers around me with real tractors that have tanks around the 200 gallon mark and just shake my head. Not that I have a lot of sympathy for a farmer who’s getting reamed on fuel costs when he still has a “Trump 2028” sign in his yard, but I do have sympathy for all the people that didn’t vote like idiots and who will be paying $40 for a loaf of bread just to make up for the farm input costs.
Hah yeah I have a b2620 if I am not mistaken and yes getting diesel to kill my 2 5.5 gallon jugs recently was ridiculous especially after dailying an EV and not stopping at gas stations hah
This year is slightly better because people are buying trucks today so they can avoid buying the new EPA 2027 trucks for awhile. Typical emission pre-buy but a very weak one for economic reasons.
We’ve had a good run at being the world’s police. Maybe it’s time for us to stop, because we sure aren’t doing a good job of it. Unless you’re a billionaire, then of course all of this conflict is great for margins
Maybe it’s time for us to stop, because we sure aren’t doing a good job of it.————-and NOBODY appreciates the good we do.
Are we great yet?
It’s so much winning I’m starting to get tired of it. /s
Winning the war on affordability.
Like 3 people in the entire country are being prevented from playing sports. So…yes?
College sports should have been fixed 30 years ago (while I was still an undergrad). Fact is, top end college football/basketball has been an unpaid minor-league for decades.
As for Trans-atheletes – I have no skin in the game, DNGAF. This is a culture war issue, not a real issue.
The Dems are unrivalled in finding the dumbest hills to die on.
Unfortunately they are forced to take stand on these minor issues to appease the mob. Then the opposition weaponizes it.
We need adults in the room.
If youth sport is a Congressional issue – we as a Country have a problem.
I literally cannot think of anything less important than youth sports.
My high school kid does fencing. He is nowhere competitive compared to those who sink untold amount of time and money into it. For the truly competitive ones they need to enroll in remote school because normal schools cannot accommodate the competition schedule. That ain’t happening in this household.
All this investment is for a sport that maybe a few dozen people in the whole world could make a good living on. At the same time all I want is my kid to be not staring at a screen 24/7.
Do I give two shits whether transgender kids can play? No, but I can understand why people get worked up from the “unfair advantage” angle.
Stop giving people ammo especially because compared to their 100 million other ridiculous grievances, this one is not the wrongest.
My child danced competitively. We had to pull her from public school to CyberSchool to meet the demands. I fought but lost. Needless to say she is NOT making a career of it.
And she is happy in her current path.
Good for her! Glad to hear that.
This is a ridiculous take.
The Republicans come out with a bunch of anti-science bullshit so they can point at a transgender kid and get half the country to bully her, then you claim the Democrats picked the hill.
No, they didn’t, and they didn’t pick the “Somali criminal” hill or the “immigrants raping people” hill or any of the other fascist bullshit the Republicans have been shoving down our throats for 50 years to obscure what they’re actually doing which is taking all of our money and giving it to billionaires.
Emotion wins elections here, science and reason do not. One side has completely weaponized this and the other has not.
Freedom of religion also implies (per the Founders) freedom FROM religion. Ben Franklin is spinning inhis grave.
You don’t have to think about long-term survival if you’re convinced you are under immediate threat. By keeping their constituents in constant panic, they can do anything they want.
If you’re Canadian, yes.