Record Breaking Price for Gas and Oil
ROBERTS: We're back at AMERICAN MORNING. It's 10 minutes after the hour. Oil spikes and gasoline hits a new high. Why did it happen? What are drivers doing about it? Ali Velshi in Philadelphia this morning with CNN's Election Express, which I take it, Ali, may not be rolling as much as it was once. Now, the diesel jumped about $4 a gallon. What's going on here with gasoline and oil prices?</s>ALI VELSHI, CNN SENIOR BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Well, you're right. First of all, that's been parked for a while but it probably cost about $1,000 to fill it with the prices of diesel as they are right now. Let me tell you, there's two different stories and I'll start with the oil because the natural evolution of things starts with oil. Oil hitting $117.40 overnight. Now, why? One is reports of rebel attacks on a pipeline in Nigeria. That happens fairly often. Nigeria is one of the world's largest producers of oil. The second one is a Japanese tanker, was attacked off the coast of Yemen. Unclear yet what happened, but one ship fired on that tanker and it was leaking oil. Now, why should one tanker affect the price of oil? It's because our supplies are so tight, we're using so much oil that any oil that isn't being processed into diesel or heating oil or gasoline causes the price to go up in an unstable market like this. Now, let's look at gasoline. According to the AAA, gasoline, the national average for a gallon of self-serve unleaded has reached $3.50 a gallon. Now, according to another survey that we use fairly often, the Lundberg survey, it's about $3.47. AAA has about 85,000 gas stations and it is based on the last credit card swipe last night. Lundberg is sort of a more scientific survey of about 7,000 gas stations so they tend to be the same one, and it's every two weeks. I should tell you the numbers tend to track each other. Now, yesterday morning, I paid about $3.78 for gas in Long Island. I paid $3.23 in New Jersey. So a national average doesn't mean anything to most people. But why are we telling you what the average is? It's because we are trying to give you a sense of the trend, and the trend in every state has been up. The question now, John, as we've discussed many times is, does $3.50 and that trend cause people to make decisions about how they drive, what they do, whether they carpool, whether they trade their car in, whether they move closer to home, that's the question right now. We have seen consumption of gasoline in the United States actually start to edge down -- John.</s>ROBERTS: Let's not forget too, Ali, that a lot of people have already been paying more than $3.50 a gallon because a lot of these new, more efficient cars have to run on, you know, super gasoline.</s>VELSHI: Premium.</s>ROBERTS: So that's about $3.75.</s>VELSHI: Yes.</s>ROBERTS: Yes. All right. Ali Velshi for us this morning.</s>VELSHI: And, by the way --</s>ROBERTS: Go ahead.</s>VELSHI: We'll chat more about it afterwards.</s>ROBERTS: All right. Thanks, Ali.</s>VELSHI: I was just going to say that -- we'll talk later.</s>ROBERTS: All right.</s>CHO: Well, high sales are up 38 percent.</s>ROBERTS: Problem with the satellite delay.</s>CHO: Yes. That's OK.</s>ROBERTS: I say it here and it doesn't reach there until two seconds later. We'll keep up to date with Ali on this this morning.</s>CHO: Yes, I know you had a beautiful Saturday, right, in D.C., but not so good Sunday. But we've had some wacky weather going on.</s>ROBERTS: It poured. It poured all day Sunday.</s>CHO: But some wild weather in our nation's capital to tell you about. Thunderstorms set off six tornadoes around Maryland and Washington, D.C. Wildfires in New Mexico. Another earthquake in southern Illinois early this morning. Rob Marciano is watching all of the extreme weather for us. Hey, Rob, good morning.</s>ROB MARCIANO, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Good morning, Alina. A possibility of all that happening again today. Might see the ground shake in Illinois, seems to not want to stop. And the storm that produced those tornadoes around D.C. is very slow to move out. Complete weather forecast is coming up after the break. Stay right there.