This is southwest Florida in focus.

Coming up.

Prices climb as the U.S.

and Iran exchange missile launches.

And while it's a war in the Middle East, it's the cost of diesel.

You may feel at home from how food is delivered to grocery stores, and how the goods you buy on a daily basis are delivered.

The price of diesel fuel plays a role in how much you pay for what you buy.

A possible bounce back for the Florida citrus industry.

Disease and storms have greatly reduced the amount of fruit produced in our state, but some new numbers show a positive sign for citrus farmers in southwest Florida and the road to recovery and the healthy lifestyle after mental health and substance use disorders.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Jennifer Crawford.

A record setting increase in the cost of diesel fuel across the country and in Florida, triple A, reporting today's average price of a gallon of diesel fuel is almost $6.

That is the highest average price ever recorded.

The national average of diesel just one year ago was $3.70 per gallon.

And today in southwest Florida, triple A says the cost of diesel is in line with the rest of the country at almost six bucks per gallon.

The ripple effect impacting just about every single thing we buy.

Economics expert and professor at Florida Gulf Coast University's College of Business Doctor Victor Clark joins us now in studio.

Thank you for joining us.

Great to be here.

We have been discussing diesel.

It is the lifeblood of the global economy and the price is soaring.

It has set a record high I believe right now it's about six bucks nationwide per gallon.

How does this impact our lives on a daily basis?

Diesel fuel.

We don't think about it very much because unless we're driving a diesel vehicle or a diesel truck as our getting around vehicle, we don't really think about it.

But every price that we pay for almost every good or every service is influenced by diesel.

Because you think about buying just one product, maybe broccoli down at your local Publix or your Walmart or your Super Target.

That broccoli started out on a farm.

Farm equipment uses diesel fuel.

And then that broccoli that had a broccoli was trucked from the farm to a place where it was processed for sale, and then it was shipped to a distribution center by for a grocery wholesaler.

And then eventually it went to your grocery store.

And every time that gets on a truck and moves from one location to another, that's one more cost that is incurred along the supply chain.

It really is true.

Diesel is the lifeblood of the supply chain, and the more something gets shipped around, even if it's a short distance.

This really adds up over time.

So how much do we rely on diesel and we don't even realize it?

Most farm equipment, harvesters, compounds those are almost exclusively using diesel fuels.

Tractor trailers exclusively using diesel fuels.

Other farm equipment like tractors, mostly diesel fuel.

So there's a lot of diesel fuel that's going on on that supply chain.

And we just go to the store and we purchase a thing.

We see that the price has gone up.

We don't know why.

We may not even need to know why.

All we know is that it feels like we've got another tax that's hitting us in our pocketbooks, just like all the additional price inflation that we've had to cover during the last 5 or 6 years, and how impactful on shipping there's so many shipping, trucking and trains to transport products.

Yeah.

The problem is that if you've got a diesel tractor or a diesel harvester, if you're a farmer, or if you've got a diesel tractor trailer, when the price of beef goes up for me, I can go to the grocery store and put down the beef and pick up the chicken and eat that instead, and make the money work a little better.

If I've got a diesel powered tractor trailer, I can't buy an alternative fuel to put in the tank of my truck that I currently have.

It's just not possible.

So when you've got a demand for diesel fuel, that's pretty constant.

As long as the supply chain continues to hum along, that demand for trucking isn't going to go away anytime soon.

Those truckers and other people use diesel.

They have to pay those higher prices.

So it's just across the board.

It is across the board.

One thing your viewers may not know, because I'm an economist and we geek out on this sort of thing.

Diesel fuel.

The federal tax on diesel is higher than it is for conventional gasoline.

So the federal tax on a gallon of gas for me is about $0.18 a gallon.

It's about $0.24 a gallon for diesel.

So even if we didn't have a current surge in prices, diesel prices are always a little higher.

Now we have seen this increase sharp increase in will and gas.

What is behind this now?

Just increasing in diesel.

It's the same thing that we've been incurring ever since the conflict in the Middle East started supply chain issues over the Strait of Hormuz, refining capacity, other processing.

And anytime you've got an interruption in the supply chain at any point, because everybody around the world is thinking about where they could get all and what they could process and turn it into, because you can turn a barrel of oil into lots of different finished goods gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, kerosene.

There's a lot of competition for that.

And when the price at on commodity market spikes, the price is going to be passed along to everybody else.

And do you expect it to go even higher?

Yeah.

We had a new producer price index released this morning.

And if you take the price increase just in August and producer price index, that's like the consumer price index, CPI tracks what I pay producer price index tracks what firms pay the producers of goods and services.

If you take the price increases in August they were about 5.5%.

And a lot of that was the increase in the diesel price.

And that's an annual rate, 5.4 5.5%.

But that only includes August when we get the number for September at the beginning of October, then annualized rate might very well be even higher than an annual and inflation rate for producers of about 5.4%.

More to come, more to watch and keeping you busy.

Yeah.

It's it's these are these are challenging times.

And one last thing.

The people who are hit the hardest by these kinds of inflationary costs are the people who have to make the money work.

Working poor young families, working class households, relatively affluent families.

They can handle these kinds of increases.

But it's really, really difficult if you're trying to make your rent payment and put food on the table and get to work and do the other things that you need to do in your life and increase in the price of broccoli may not seem like a big deal to a privileged person, but if you're trying hard to make the money work, it just feels like a tax that never ends.

All right, doctor Victor.

Claire, thank you for joining us again today.

Thank you.

To follow along with updates on fuel prices and other business stories that impact Southwest Florida, you can visit WGCU senior environmental reporter Tom Bayless is here to update us on some important environmental stories in Southwest Florida.

Thanks for joining us in studio today.

Hi, Jennifer.

Now, there may be a very bright spot in the citrus industry in Southwest Florida.

That's right.

You know, the numbers just came in for the most recent growing season.

And the news.

While there may be caveats, contains a pleasant surprise.

You know, orange is built Florida long before there was a Mickey mouse.

The orange blossom remains the state flower, the orange, the state fruit and orange juice.

The state beverage.

Groves paid for courthouses in college and tuitions.

And the money ran through families for 3 or 4 generations.

But the groves that once defined the state have been disappearing for decades.

Some were bulldozed for subdivisions and shopping centers as the land became more valuable than the fruit growing on it.

Other families sold when younger generations chose not to continue farming, and freezes and citrus killing pests and diseases like citrus greening came along.

That's caused by a psyllid so small it can hardly be seen with the naked eye.

The savviest buyers turned to Brazil, where freezes were not a threat, and soon Brazil to throne Florida to become the world's largest orange juice producer.

And Florida, once the world's top exporter of concentrate, began buying it.

That makes what happened during the latest growing season not much more remarkable.

Florida produced nearly 16 million boxes of citrus, up 7%.

The problem is the rebound comes after a really bad season.

Growers produce nearly a third fewer boxes in the 2425 season, which was down 28%.

But Southwest Florida's growers beat the averages.

Five counties are responsible for the 73% of this year's crop growers, and Highlands, De Soto and Hardy counties are among those and produced 6 million boxes.

Those are great numbers.

Will Florida citrus farmers be able to rebound?

Jennifer.

That's the future.

That's hard to predict.

But Brazil is having a tough time.

Since citrus greening showed up there, nearly 50% of the orange trees in their in their San Paolo citrus belt are infected with greening.

And I was in Brazil, in that very region a little over a decade ago, reporting on their dominance in citrus over the U.S., and it wasn't a problem then.

I never want to wish bad mojo on anyone else, but you can see how fast something like greening can affect a citrus powerhouse.

And if they're faltering, someone, somewhere is going to pick up that slack.

And I don't think growers in southwest Florida would mind if that were them.

Well, Tom, let's talk about hurricane season.

September 10th, 2017.

Hurricane Irma made landfall in southwest Florida on Marco Island.

It was a devastating storm across the state of Florida.

We, however, have been lucky so far in 2026 and it has been calm and we we want it to stay that way.

Certainly has.

This year's hurricane season is about to set a new record for doing nothing.

Five tropical storms have formed since June, and not one of them has reached hurricane strength.

And that is not forecast to happen before or during Friday, which is September 11th, the latest in recent history.

And Atlantic Hurricane has first formed Gustav in 2002 and Umberto in 2013.

Share that date.

The National Hurricane Center sees no tropical development in the Atlantic over the next seven days, and Meghan Borowski of the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network agrees.

It's not entirely surprising, right, because we have El Nino, which developed, and it's the strongest new on record.

And what that phenomenon does is it increases vertical wind shear in the tropical Atlantic.

And the more wind shear we have, the less likely we are to have tropical cyclones, because it tends to scramble up the thunderstorm activity that we need for for tropical storms to to actually develop an organize.

So we might get through September or October, November and be okay in terms of hurricanes or tropical storms.

But El Nino can actually increase the chance that we'll have strong cold fronts move through the state.

And we could have squall line thunderstorms that could increase our chance for damaging winds and for tornadoes.

So we're not in the clear once hurricane season concludes.

The El Nino, which typically causes a wetter winter over Florida, is expected to build into the strongest one ever, but perhaps not until the start of 2027.

That would leave wind shear in place to continue to lessen the chances of a hurricane, but it does not guarantee one or more hurricanes will not form during the three months left in the season.

It's been since 1914 that no hurricane formed in the Atlantic during hurricane season.

The closest Florida has been to no hurricanes in recent years was in 1983, when there were four hurricanes.

But just one of them were was Major Hurricane Alicia, which hit Galveston and Houston in August and caused more than $2 billion in damage.

The National Hurricane Center sees no tropical development in the Atlantic over the next seven days, which would push this season past that mark and into the record books.

And forecasters at Noah are sticking with their call for a below normal season.

But the calendar still has three months left on it before the Atlantic season is over.

Late year hurricanes often start in the Gulf and head this way, so it's too early to say, but I do like that we are going to be setting a record that's a great record to actually break.

I don't think there's going to be a storm forming in the next 24 or so hours.

Fingers crossed.

Thank you Tom.

For more stories from Tom Bayliss regarding the stories impacting the Southwest Florida environment, you can check out our website.

Coming up, a modern medical device that has helped people with severe hearing loss around the world.

We find out about the pioneers behind cochlear implant.

Researchers say cochlear implants have allowed more than 1 million people around the world to hear, in some cases for the very first time.

The five pioneering researchers who made this possible are now receiving the Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology for their decades of work.

The cochlear implant is the first medical device to interface with the nervous system to provide a sense of hearing.

The implants were first commercially available back in the 1980s.

All five researchers will be honored at MIT next week for their life's work.

Joining us now is Doctor Michael Mirza, who will be the upcoming recipient of the Merkin Prize for his studies in hearing.

Doctor, thank you for joining us today.

Nice to be with you, Jennifer.

And I'd like to start with why you chose to go into the field of neuroscience and cochlear implants initially.

Well, I was interested in hearing I was interested in the language.

I was interested in how you account for our humanity and our human abilities as it relates to the operations of the brain.

And and I was also interested in hearing and deafness.

And so all of those things sort of converged in the studies, in the work on development of cochlear implants.

Can you explain how neuroscience and electrical signals from the brain are part of what and how we actually here?

Well, in the hearing organ you have a wonderful sensory cell population, which are called hair cells, which actually converts sound into electoral signals that that engage the hearing nerve and that hearing nerd feeds information to the brain that represents what we hear.

And it actually devolves sound as a function of frequency, low frequencies on one end of the of the band, high frequencies on the other, so it separately represents them, delivers in the brain in a in a beautifully organized way.

And so that's how hearing ordinarily works.

But when someone loses their hearing, especially when the hearing loss is profound, what happens is, is that the sensory cells die, but the nerve is commonly still intact.

It's sitting there waiting to be excited artificially by something like a cochlear implant.

And when we hear the term cochlear implant, how does that different from a hearing aid?

Well, a hearing aid basically is trying to make up.

It's trying to use the hearing you have retained and trying to make the most of it.

In a cochlear implant, you haven't generally retained any hearing.

You're deaf.

You maybe had hearing before, but now you have none.

So you're you're left in a silent world, a quiet world where you can't hear the people that you love.

Would love to talk to a new day.

You're deaf to the sounds of the world you live in.

And so what a cochlear implant does is it excites the hearing nerve directly by electrically shocking it in a patterned way, simulating the normal information that that it would deliver to the brain is if you could hear and if the hearing organ were intact.

So it's a it's a bit of trickery and trying to figure out how to how to control simulation in the ear so that you can deliver enough information to the brain.

The brain can sort of figure out what's happening out there in the world of sound.

It's fascinating.

Now, the Merkin Prize that you're going to receive on September 15th, it's awarded by MIT and Harvard.

How does this recognition put your life's work into perspective?

Well, first of all, it's a team effort.

You know, lots of engineering and neuroscience and medicine and medical efforts have gone into it to make it happen.

And it happened not just in our laboratory but in other laboratories in the world.

So it's a it's a team effort.

It's a it's a national effort.

It's an international achievement.

But what a wonderful thing it is for it to be acknowledged for those teams.

And what a wonderful the thing it is for it to be used as the example of what can happen when we all work together to solve some seemingly impossible problem.

And that's the miracle of restoring hearing in someone that can hear nothing.

And what it means to those individuals who can hear nothing, that have that hearing restored is a beautiful thing to see.

How widespread is the use of these implants?

There's about a million of them out there, and they're being applied at a relatively high rate.

So, you know, ultimately they're reaching a substantial fraction of the individuals in the world who are profoundly deaf.

And more and more, they're being applied to people that are born deaf, to children that are born deaf, that can reestablish in early life, relatively normal hearing ability, operating in the in the dominant native language that they happen to be living in.

Well, congratulations.

Which is the language of their oral speech.

Congratulations to you.

We are all so happy for you.

It sounds like you've just done remarkable work throughout your life.

Thank you.

It's been great.

It's great.

Very nice to talk with you, Jennifer.

And all of this work has been highly rewarding and great fun by working with a wonderful team of individuals.

Thank you, Doctor Michael Myers, for joining us today.

For health trends and the latest medical breakthroughs.

Make sure you are keeping up with all of the health related stories by visiting our website WGCU.

Coming up, the goal to increase public awareness of mental health and substance use disorders and the encouragement to help pe September marks National Recovery Month, a time dedicated to celebrating individuals in recovery and the professionals that make it possible.

That includes the team at the David Lawrence Centers for Behavioral Health in Naples, it reports serving 9000 people every year.

Maggie Baldwin joins us now from the nonprofit.

David Lawrence Centers for Behavioral Health in Collier County, where she is the director of the Crossroads Continuum Program.

And I want to make a note that David Lawrence Centers is also a sponsor of WGCU Public Media.

Maggie, thank you for joining us today in studio.

Can you tell us what is this program, this crossroads continuum?

Absolutely.

So crossroads continuum is our continuum of care for individuals, adults who have substance use disorder, substance use disorder and need treatment.

So it's different levels of care.

So it's our medically monitored detox.

It's our inpatient residential program intensive outpatient outpatient treatment medication assisted treatment care coordination recovery support and our recovery homes.

So everything from inpatient to outpatient and everything in between.

And what are the demographics as far as whom you serve?

So in crossroads, we serve adults 18 to 80, let's say, and substance use disorder treatment does not discriminate.

So we see, you know, people from many different walks of life, different demographics, men and women with different a variety of different substance use disorders, from alcohol use disorder to opioid use disorder and everything in between.

And can you talk a little bit more specifically about the sober living?

Absolutely.

So we right now we have two FA certified recovery residences for for men.

Our Hope home, which has six male residents, are Justin's home for six male residents.

And we also partner with Alpha House, which is through warrior Homes.

And recovery.

Homes are such an important part of treatment because now folks that have been in treatment are in the community, and sober living provides a very safe, structured, sober living environment.

So there's oversight.

We have our peer specialists who provide services in the home, peer recovery services in the home.

And because we're far certified, we have to manage the homes according to a set of standards.

So it's just safe, sober living.

And September is National Recovery Month.

What does that mean for you and your team, your organization?

Well, it's an opportunity to celebrate people in recovery, to celebrate the strength and resilience of individuals who are in recovery, as well as the staff that are dedicated to help people, families who are there to support their loved ones.

And it's a way to recognize that recovery isn't a just about abstaining from substances.

It's truly about rebuilding one's life, finding purpose, improving health, restoring relationships.

These are all the benefits of being in recovery.

How great is the need for this kind of service?

I think the need is very great.

As I was saying earlier, most people who struggle with a substance use disorder don't come in for treatment.

There's stigma, there's fear, there's that not willing to want help.

Sometimes there's that denial or that feeling that I can just do this on my own.

So we only see the tip of the iceberg of people coming in for help.

So that's why it's great to get the message out that there is help.

Recovery is possible.

What would you like our our audience members to know about where they can get help if they if they feel that they need it?

Absolutely.

People can go to our website, David Lawrence Centers.

Or if somebody is ready, they can just walk in, they can walk in.

Our lobby is open 24 over seven, whether it's for our acute care, mental health or for detox, just walking in and making that decision.

And how does affordability factor into the treatment and the care program?

We don't turn anyone away.

So we accept insurance, but we also have the ability to qualify people for our sliding scale, and we do our very best not to turn anyone away.

I mean, we people are ready for help, especially when it comes to substance use.

We are ready to receive them.

Maggie Baldwin, thank you so much for joining us.

Today is great information to share with our community.

Thank you.

All.

Throughout September and as part of National Recovery Month, you can find more stories and resources by visiting our website.

Once again, it's coming up on our next program.

We pay tribute to first responders on the 25th anniversary of the September 11th terror attack, we will look at how Southwest Florida military veterans are working together after their tours of duty.

Thank you for joining us.

Make sure you head to where you'll find all of our stories.

We look forward to seeing you again right here on Southwest Florida in focus.