Once gas prices hit a certain high number, consumers respond.
“We can consolidate our trips to the grocery. We can carpool. We can purchase more economical vehicles,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist at University of Houston.
But diesel is different. “With diesel, there's less flexibility on the demand side to respond to higher prices, and so … typically the higher price of diesel is passed along to the consumer very quickly,” Hirs said.
Crops still need to be harvested and widgets still need to be shipped. Mid-September is the start of the fall agricultural season, when commodities like corn and soybeans need to be harvested and transported around the globe.
“Seventy percent of that diesel is consumed in transportation, and there really aren't any significant scalable substitutes outside of rail, which has its limitations,” said Will O’Neil, energy analyst at S&P Global Energy.
He said even in other segments, like agriculture and heating oil, “it's difficult to get a snap ability to shift those to non-diesel consumption.”
The reality is, diesel doesn’t have great alternatives, and we'll all be paying for it.
“You'll be paying in everything: bananas, oranges, strawberries,” said Susan Bell at Rystad Energy. | 
