Why are these people standing in the window of Talbot AIG insurance in the City of London?
New fossil fuel projects need three things: permits, money and insurance. Without insurance, most new fossil fuel projects cannot go ahead, and existing ones must close. This makes insurance the Achilles heel of the fossil fuel industry.
Fossil fuel operations around the world are enabled by insurance Houses in the City of London. In 2022, AIG alone collected an estimated $425-675 million in premiums from fossil fuel companies, and held $24.2 billion in fossil fuel investments. It insures almost a third of all US coal production. At the same time AIG effectively abandoned communities in California by no longer providing insurance to homeowners within the state, following years of escalating climate disasters.
‘Insure Our Future’, a global week of action, aimed to hold the industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis and help accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels.
Insurance campaigning has already made new coal power plants almost uninsurable, threatening their viability. Coal companies are finding it increasingly difficult to access insurance cover even for their ongoing operations. But the industry is lagging way behind the pace of climate breakdown.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly appealed to the business community to take urgent steps to scale up climate action. “Climate destruction is not moving incrementally”, he said in February 2023. “We cannot move incrementally. This is not a time for tinkering. It is a time for transformation.”
You can read more here:
https://global.insure-our-future.com/global-week-of-action-2024/