** Oil prices could be affected if an anticipated high tide doesn’t remove a massive container ship that is blocking the Suez canal. “If the high tide fails to move the ship, we could see another short squeeze in oil with extended drawdowns in inventories,” Phillip Streible, chief market strategist at Blue Line Futures, told MarketWatch.
** The American Petroleum Institute announced that it supports putting a price on carbon emissions — a term that typically refers to emissions taxes or permit trading systems. The new posture marks a major shift for the powerful K Street lobbying group, though signs of the endorsement emerged weeks ago.
** The world’s wind power industry is falling far short of installing the capacity needed to limit global warming, a report by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) showed. And the current rate of wind power deployment will not be enough to reach net zero emissions by the middle of this century, the GWEC said in a statement.
** Some 60 of the world’s largest commercial and investment banks have in total put $3.8 trillion into fossil fuels from 2016 to 2020, the five years after the voluntary Paris Agreement was signed.
** Pennsylvania’s highest court has delivered a victory for natural gas exploration firms, ruling that the state attorney general’s office doesn’t have authority under state law to sue them on consumer protection grounds over their mineral rights-leasing practices.
** The number of people reported dead after last month’s winter storm and outages has more than doubled the initial count to 111, according to a Texas agency.
** A judge denies bond for the first of two tree-sitters arrested after defying a November order to stop blocking the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
** The University of Michigan will divest its roughly $14 billion endowment from fossil fuels after years of pressure from some students and faculty.
** Seven Line 3 protesters are arrested in northern Minnesota after chaining themselves to heavy construction machinery and access gates.
** EPA is revoking an expansion permit for an oil refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands, citing concerns on the facility’s environmental impact on the local community. The Limetree Bay oil refinery will still be able to function, but will no longer have the same freedoms to build new units afforded under the permit.