Trump signs small business loan program extension, $2 trillion a year refining industry pain, and other news from around the web

Crude oil is the world’s most important commodity, but it’s worthless without a refinery turning it into the products that people actually use: gasoline, diesel, jet-fuel and petrochemicals for plastics. And the world’s refining industry today is in pain like never before.

“Refining margins are absolutely catastrophic,” Patrick Pouyanne, the head of Europe’s top oil refining group Total SA, told investors last month, echoing a widely held view among executives, traders and analysts.

President Trump signed legislation Saturday extending the deadline for small businesses to apply for the Paycheck Protection Program, enacted in the weeks following the economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The original deadline to apply for the PPP was this past Tuesday night. But $130 billion still remained in the fund, out of $660 billion allocated. Both houses of Congress approved the extension unanimously earlier this week. With Trump's signature Saturday, businesses will now have until Aug. 8 to apply for the assistance.

One of the largest utilities in America is starting to turn its back on natural gas.

Dominion Energy Inc., the second-biggest U.S. power company by market value, on Sunday said it’s selling substantially all of its gas pipeline and storage assets to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. for $4 billion. It’s the largest deal announced this year to buy U.S. energy assets, according to Bloomberg data.

In a separate statement, Dominion and its partner Duke Energy Corp. said they’re killing the controversial Atlantic Coast gas pipeline along the U.S. East Coast, citing ongoing delays and “cost uncertainty.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed climate change from the headlines, but it has hardly arrested it. In the last month, the warming Indian Ocean has encouraged swarms of locusts to hop from East Africa to South Asia. A dust cloud has drifted from the Sahara desert to the Americas. Wildfires have raged in the thawing permafrost of Siberia. This global crisis—like the one occasioned by the novel coronavirus, only more permanently—threatens to shock the global financial system. The consequences of climate change could lead to turmoil in the insurance and banking industries, while upending the energy sector, together producing a financial crisis unlike one ever seen before.

But before the pandemic scrambled economies, a group of global central banks and financial regulators led by Europeans had agreed on ways to manage the risks that global warming posed. These banks and regulators have since been forced to enact emergency measures to cope with the pandemic, so they have largely ignored, abandoned, or delayed many of their own prescriptions. Instead, they are now propping up the very coal, oil, and gas industries that ultimately threaten the financial system by accelerating climate change.