OpenAI's waiting game, gas pump pain, and severe sulfur strain

The numbers are staggering: $108 billion in extra fuel costs for American consumers since the war in Ukraine began, a $1.2 trillion valuation for OpenAI as it debates going public, and sulfur prices that have jumped roughly 500% above their 10-year average. This week's episode of The Indicator from Planet Money tracks three developments that, in different ways, show how global disruptions ripple through the economy.

The real-time cost of war at the pump

Waylon Wong led with a figure from the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University: American consumers have paid $108 billion in additional fuel costs—both gas and diesel—since the war in Ukraine started in late February. That works out to roughly $820 per U.S. household. The lab tracks these numbers live on its website, where visitors can watch the red digits tick upward in real time.

The "additional" part matters. The researchers compare current fuel costs to a counterfactual—an alternate reality where the war never happened. Since nobody has a time machine, they use a 30-day average price from before the war and adjust it for seasonal factors (people drive more in summer, for example). That gives their best estimate of where prices would be without the conflict.