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New Liberty Mutual CEO Tim Sweeney Faces Pressure to Act on Climate
Global campaign calls on Sweeney to stop insuring fossil fuel expansion
BOSTON, Mass.
Liberty Mutual’s new CEO Tim Sweeney, who officially took helm of the Boston-based insurer on Sunday, is facing calls to clean up his company’s climate and human rights record. Activists gathered outside the insurer’s Boston headquarters this week to ask Sweeney if he will step up as a climate leader and stop insuring fossil fuel expansion projects (photos here).
“A global campaign of climate advocates, Indigenous leaders, youth activists is calling on Sweeney to change the company’s course today and make Liberty Mutual a bold leader among U.S. insurers,” said Elana Sulakshana, Senior Energy Finance Campaigner at Rainforest Action Network. “Fossil fuel projects cannot be built or operated without insurance. As insurers around the world adopt policies limiting their support for these dirty energy projects, Liberty Mutual remains a top fossil fuel insurer and plays an increasingly key role in enabling the expansion of coal, oil, and gas infrastructure that the climate cannot afford.”
Although Liberty Mutual adopted restrictions on insuring and investing in coal in 2019, the policy is rife with loopholes that allow it to continue to insure new coal-fired power plants globally. With zero policies on oil and gas whatsoever, Liberty is lagging behind global and U.S. peers when it comes to climate action.
While it continues to insure and invest in fossil fuel projects and companies, Liberty is already taking an economic toll from the impacts of climate change. This past year, Liberty had among the highest catastrophe losses among US insurers, due to Hurricane Ian and other climate-fueled disasters. Sweeney works out of Liberty Mutual’s Boston headquarters, which are themselves at risk of flooding if global temperatures warm beyond 3ºC.
“It’s time for Liberty Mutual to stop fueling global warming,” said Massachusetts State Representative Dylan Fernandes, who represents Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket counties. “In Massachusetts, we see firsthand how climate change is causing flooding, heatwaves, and economic fallout. It is never acceptable to profit from the destruction of the health of our planet and its people. As the new CEO, Sweeney must divest from climate destruction, and instead invest in solutions that protect our planet and communities.”
As Liberty’s leadership transition unfolds, there are a number of decisions that communities around the world will be watching closely. Frontline and Indigenous leaders have reached out directly to discuss the harmful impacts of projects Liberty is insuring on their lands and livelihoods, but have been met with silence from the company. It remains to be seen if Sweeney, an advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion, will come to the table.
Liberty Mutual has come under fire for its insurance coverage of the Trans Mountain tar sands oil pipeline in Canada from First Nations and climate activists, but it has so far refused to cut ties. By contrast, twenty-two insurers have adopted policies limiting coverage for the tar sands oil sector, citing climate and human rights risks.
“For years, Liberty Mutual has ignored our letters and refused to sit down and hear our concerns about the multitude of risks facing the Trans Mountain Expansion Project. We have reviewed the pipeline under our own laws, and the Tsleil Waututh Nation continues to withhold our free, prior, and informed consent for the pipeline. We hope that CEO Sweeney will live up to his rhetoric on diversity, equity, and inclusion and stop insuring the Trans Mountain pipeline and other tar sands and fossil fuel projects that violate Indigenous rights and worsen the climate crisis,” said Charlene Aleck, spokesperson for Tsleil-Waututh Nation Sacred Trust Initiative.
In Uganda and Tanzania, activists are calling on Liberty Mutual to rule out support for the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), which would be the longest heated crude oil pipeline in the world if constructed and has already displaced thousands of people. Unlike 22 global insurers, Liberty Mutual is still at risk of supporting the project, which is currently on the market for insurance coverage.
“EACOP is facing serious risks that financial institutions do not want to support: the destruction of ecologically diverse and wildlife-rich regions, a massive carbon footprint, and mounting community resistance. The #StopEACOP campaign urges CEO Sweeney to swiftly rule out any support for the project and for deadly fossil fuel expansion,” said Samuel Okulony of Environment Governance Institute, a Ugandan organization and member of the #StopEACOP Campaign.
Liberty Mutual has also been linked to offshore oil and gas drilling in Brazil and the expansion of coal-fired power in Southeast Asia, among other projects. According to the latest data from the California Department of Insurance, Liberty had $2.3 billion invested in fossil fuel companies.
Rainforest Action Network (RAN) is headquartered in San Francisco, California with offices staff in Tokyo, Japan, and Edmonton, Canada, plus thousands of volunteer scientists, teachers, parents, students and other concerned citizens around the world. We believe that a sustainable world can be created in our lifetime and that aggressive action must be taken immediately to leave a safe and secure world for our children.
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Lancet Study Shows Over 3 Million Years of Human Life Lost in Israeli Assault on Gaza
"To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out," said the head of a US advocacy group.
Nov 03, 2025
As Israeli forces continued to violate a fragile ceasefire agreement with Hamas, killing more people in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States renewed calls for cutting off military aid to Israel, citing a new study in The Lancet.
"This new Lancet study offers more evidence of the catastrophic human cost of Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people," Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
The correspondence published Friday by the famed British medical journal was submitted by Colorado State University professor Sammy Zahran, an expert in health economics, and Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon teaching at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Zahran and Abu-Sittah provided an estimate of the number of years of life lost, based on an official death toll list published by the Gaza Ministry of Health at the end of July, which included the age and sex of 60,199 Palestinians. They noted that the list is "restricted to deaths linked explicitly to actions by the Israeli military, excluding indirect deaths resulting from the ruin of infrastructure and medical facilities, restriction of food and water, and the loss of medical personnel that support life."
The pair calculated life expectancies in the state of Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem—by sex for all ages, using mortality and population data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs for 2022. They estimated that a total of 3,082,363 life-years were lost in Gaza as a result of the Israeli assault since October 7, 2023.
"We find that most life-years lost are among civilians, even under the relaxed definition of a supposed combatant involving all men and boys of possible conscription age (15–44 years)," the paper states. "More than 1 million life-years involving children under the age of 15 years... have been lost."
CAIR's Awad said, "To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out. It is a deliberate effort to destroy a people."
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
"The United States and the international community must end their complicity by halting all military aid to Israel and supporting full accountability for these crimes under international law," Awad argued.
A report published last month by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the Biden and Trump administrations provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since the start of the war.
Federal law prohibits the US government from providing security assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of human rights abuses. The Washington Post last week reported on a classified State Department document detailing "many hundreds" of alleged violations by Israeli forces in Gaza that are expected to take "multiple years" to review.
With President Donald Trump seeking a Nobel Peace Prize, the US helped negotiate the current ceasefire, which began on October 10, after over two years of devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. The head of Gaza's Government Media Office said Monday that Israeli forces have committed at least 194 violations of the agreement.
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The world's top authority on hunger said Monday that a ceasefire in Sudan is needed to "contain the extreme levels of acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition" that have taken hold in the war-ravaged African country as it declared famine has spread to two regions there.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a United Nations-backed partnership, said it has detected famine in el-Fasher, the city in North Darfur State that the government's former allied militia, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), seized last week, and Kadugli town in South Kordofan.
The IPC said at least 20 other areas in Darfur and Kordofan are at risk of famine, but fighting between the RSF and Sudanese government forces has impeded the group's assessments in places like the besieged town of Dilling, where the situation is likely "similar" to that of Kadugli.
"Urgent steps should be taken to allow full humanitarian access and assessment in this area," said the IPC.
In the towns where experts have been able to take stock of the humanitarian disaster—now one of the worst in the world, according to the United Nations—hundreds of thousands of people are facing “a total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition, and death.”
The IPC, which rates hunger on a scale of 1-5, determines that famine has taken hold in places where malnutrition has caused at least two deaths per 10,000 people, or four deaths per 10,000 children under the age of 5; at least 1 in 5 households severely lack food; and at least 30% of children have been found to suffer from acute malnutrition.
In the two regions included in the IPC report Monday, about 375,000 people have been pushed into famine (IPC Phase 5), and another 6.3 million people across the country face are in IPC Phase 4, classified as an "emergency" hunger crisis.
More than 21 million people face acute levels of food insecurity.
Towns near el-Fasher are also at risk of famine, including Tawila, Melit, and Tawisha.
Food supplies have been largely cut off in el-Fasher over the last 18 months as it has been under siege by the RSF, which killed more than 1,500 people in massacres last week as it took over the city.
Nearly 10 million people have been internally displaced by the civil war—the world's largest displacement crisis—with many sheltering in overcrowded public buildings with inadequate access to food as well as sanitation.
More than 19 million people in Sudan are expected to experience acute food insecurity by January 2026 as humanitarian aid groups continue to be blocked from getting supplies to starving households and harvests in Darfur and Kordofan are expected to be "well below average due to insecurity, despite favorable agroclimatic conditions."
Food prices are also expected to remain high and ultimately rise in the first half of next year as stocks decline.
"An immediate ceasefire and humanitarian access are a must to prevent further deterioration and save lives!" said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization.
The IPC said only 21% of people in need currently have access to humanitarian aid, and in Kadugli, the aid group Save the Children said that its food supplies ran out in September as fighting there escalated.
Tens of thousands of people in the town are trapped there as the RSF—which is backed by the United Arab Emirates, whose government has received military support from the US—tries to seize more territory.
The IPC previously declared famine in three refugee camps near el-Fasher and in part of South and West Kordofan provinces, since fighting began in April 2023.
The UN has estimated more than 40,000 people have been killed, but aid groups warn the true death toll is likely much higher.
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Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Monday taunted top rival Andrew Cuomo for receiving a decidedly backhanded endorsement from President Donald Trump.
During an interview on CBS News' "60 Minutes" that aired on Sunday, Trump criticized both Cuomo and Mamdani, but said that he would pick the former New York governor to be New York City's next mayor if forced to choose.
“I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other," the president said. "But if it's gonna be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you."
Trump again says that he prefers that Cuomo wins the NYC mayoral race.
“I’m not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other, but if it’s gonna be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you.”pic.twitter.com/pGpdMSvotf
— bryan metzger (@metzgov) November 3, 2025
Mamdani, a Democratic state Assembly member who has represented District 36 since 2021, immediately pounced on Trump's remarks and sarcastically congratulated his rival for winning the endorsement of a president who is deeply unpopular in New York City.
"Congratulations, Andrew Cuomo!" he wrote in a social media post. "I know how hard you worked for this."
A leaked audio recording from a Cuomo fundraiser in the Hamptons in August included comments from the former governor about help he expected to receive from Trump as he ran as an independent in the mayoral race, following his loss to Mamdani in the Democratic primary. Cuomo and Trump have reportedly spoken about the race.
The former governor has also suggested that protests against Trump's deployment of federal immigration agents are an "overreaction," and has declined to forcefully condemn the president's weaponization of the justice system against his political opponents.
The New York City mayoral election will conclude on Tuesday night, and polls currently show Mamdani with a commanding lead over Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that New Yorkers cast 735,000 early ballots this year, which the paper notes is "the highest early in-person turnout ever for a non-presidential election in New York."
The Times also noted that more than 150,000 early ballots were cast on the final day of early voting, driven by a surge in young voters flocking to the polls.
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Cuomo also appeared to agree with a recent comment from radio host Sid Rosenberg, who said Mamdani would "be cheering" if "another 9/11" took place.
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