As gas prices have skyrocketed amid the United States and Israeli governments’ military actions in Iran, Brown researchers launched an online tracker to follow the war’s costs for American consumers. The tracker estimates over $24 billion in growing consumer burden since the war began on Feb. 28.
Published by the Climate Solutions Lab in the Watson School of International and Public Affairs, the tracker compares gasoline and diesel prices to a pre-war baseline. Director of the Climate Solutions Lab Jeff Colgan, who is a professor of political science and of international and public affairs, started the tracker to highlight the immense cost of the war in Iran — drawing inspiration from the Watson School’s Costs of War project, which tracks long-term costs of numerous global conflicts.
“The tracker is built for journalists and anyone who wants to get a sense of the cost impact of the war for Americans in terms of their everyday fuel purchases — which is only one part of the total cost of the war,” Colgan wrote in an email to The Herald, adding that it “shows that the average U.S. household has spent almost $200 extra on fuel costs since the war began — so far.”
“Just think of all of the things that we as a country could have done with that money — funding for science, for medical innovation, for clean energy — that we are wasting on extra fuel costs,” Colgan added.
Colgan hired John Perdue ’26 to code the website. To build the tracker, Perdue used gasoline and diesel price data from the American Automobile Association, data on demand from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and Census Bureau data to estimate how much fuel is costing. He compared the current gas price changes to a five-year historical average of daily price changes of gasoline to understand how much extra the fuel is costing right now.
Perdue’s algorithm calculates based on on the wholesale spot price of gasoline in the New York Harbor — a major port for petroleum — rather than using financial instruments like futures contracts.
The spot price is more “representative of actual prices because there’s less distortion from banks or hedge funds taking speculative bets,” he said.
While gasoline is the most common type of fuel used directly by Americans, diesel was included in the tracker because it still has a broader economic impact. Diesel is “the industrial fuel of our economy,” powering power plants, trucks, ships and trains, Perdue said. “Even if you don’t feel it at the pump, those are prices that get carried onto the consumer.”
Perdue said that the process of building the tracker was fairly straightforward and similar to what Perdue had learned in his CSCI 0320: “Introduction to Software Engineering” class. In fact, “the initial buildout was probably three to four hours of work,” he said — but various other logistical tasks took a few weeks before the website could be launched.
Colgan and Perdue anticipate that the tracker will remain active for many months, even beyond an end to the war.
“We’re going into summer driving demand, and we know gasoline demand spikes in the summer,” Perdue said. “So you compound this supply constraint when we should be preparing for summer demand … now things could get really tight.”
“I think it’ll take longer than you would expect to see prices go back down,” he added.
