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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.
LATEST NEWS
Trump Orders Pentagon to Purchase Coal Energy in Latest Move Propping Up Climate-Wrecking, Costly Plants
“Reality doesn’t lie: Coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future," said one climate action advocate.
Feb 12, 2026
“The 19th century called, and it wants its fuel source back," said the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council on Wednesday as President Donald Trump announced his latest attempt to prop up the pollution-causing, expensive coal industry with taxpayer funds—this time by ordering the Pentagon to purchase electricity directly from coal-fired power plants.
"While Americans are demanding clean, affordable energy, the Trump administration is using our tax dollars to prop up the nation’s dirtiest, least efficient power plants," said Manish Bapna of the NRDC.
At an event at the White House, Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to sign long-term, taxpayer-funded contracts with coal plants that would likely have otherwise been retired in the coming years, to purchase energy to power military installations.
"Hard to think of a dumber 21st Century energy and security policy than Trump's insistence that the Pentagon buy more coal power," said the Military Emissions Gap, a UK-based project that monitors military emissions data.
Trump also announced $175 million from the Energy Department to upgrade six coal plants in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia, and was presented with a trophy naming him the “Undisputed Champion of Beautiful Clean Coal" by the Washington Coal Club.
The Trump administration's persistent efforts to cancel the planned closures of large coal plants have been challenged not only by more than a dozen state governments, but by the owners of at least one of the facilities and two utilities in Colorado.
The utilities, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association and Platte River Power Authority, accused the administration of violating the Takings Clause of the US Constitution's Fifth Amendment, which states that “private property [shall not] be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
They argued in a regulatory filing last month that “the costs of compliance fall directly on their members and customers, who must now pay."
Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, told the Washington Post that the administration's decision to compel coal plants to continue operating has raised household "energy bills while providing negligible benefits to consumers.”
“Each of the five plants were slated to retire because they are expensive to operate and there are cheaper sources of power available to meet consumers’ needs,” Peskoe told the Post. “Plant owners aren’t just flipping a switch to turn the plants back on—they are spending millions on maintenance, renewing expired coal contracts and rehiring workers.”
“It’s no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are handing Trump an award today. Trump asked them for campaign cash and promised to return the favor—and now he is."
Bapna said Trump's latest actions on coal were the result of the president's campaign promise to fossil fuel executives, whom he asked for $1 billion in campaign donations and pledged to gut climate regulations in return.
“It’s no wonder fossil fuel lobbyists are handing Trump an award today. Trump asked them for campaign cash and promised to return the favor—and now he is," said Bapna. "The rest of us are left to pay the price: more heart disease and asthma attacks, higher utility bills, and more frequent unnatural disasters. This is a raw deal for our wallets, our health, and our future.”
Julie McNamara, associate policy director of the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out that Americans will face higher electricity bills and be forced to pay for the new Department of Defense contracts at a time when "people and businesses across the country are struggling with rapidly escalating electricity costs" while other countries around the world expand their use of far cheaper renewable energy sources.
"The country has real solutions at hand—yet instead of pushing ahead with investments in the fastest, cheapest, cleanest resources available, the Trump administration is actively doing everything it can to stop the deployment of new solar and wind projects, to stop investments in energy efficiency, and to stop the buildout of modern grid infrastructure," said McNamara.
“Reality doesn’t lie: Coal is a rapidly dwindling relic of the past, not a solution for the future," she added. "The Trump administration’s flailings come with real consequences. Forcing the use of increasingly unreliable and relentlessly uneconomic coal plants will risk outages and send high electricity costs higher. Recklessly slashing health, safety, and environmental standards will harm people’s health and the environment. And opting for hollow statements and short-term bailouts fails to meaningfully deliver for the coal-dependent communities requiring actual, durable transition solutions."
Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, suggested that Trump's latest handouts to coal firms "ignores basic economics" while also proving that "coal can't compete without a taxpayer-funded bailout."
"Our military is one of the largest consumers of energy in the world," said Alt. "Instead of improving the efficiency of our military and the quality of life for those serving our country, this order saddles taxpayers with inflated energy costs while exposing millions of Americans to more toxic pollution from old, inefficient plants."
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Republicans Approve 'Dystopian' Voter Suppression Bill That Would Force States to Give Info to DHS
"The campaign to rig our elections is well underway," warned one expert.
Feb 12, 2026
Doing President Donald Trump's bidding, the Republican-controlled US House on Wednesday approved legislation that would potentially prevent millions of Americans from participating in federal elections by instituting draconian voter ID requirements, mandating documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, and requiring states to share voter information with the Department of Homeland Security.
The White House-backed legislation, an updated version of the so-called SAVE Act that the House approved in 2024, passed with the support of every Republican who took part in the vote and one Democrat, Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas—notably the recipient of a pardon from the president.
Election experts and watchdog groups said the bill represents a massive assault on the right to vote, with many of its provisions directly in line with what Trump has demanded ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“Congressional Republicans are attempting to commandeer the midterm election cycle and increase voting margins in President Trump’s favor by putting a finger on the scale of our elections and pushing nonsensical, anti-democratic laws to stop voters from casting a ballot," said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. "This overreaching, un-American bill tacks on unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to vote, all of which would harm voters across the political spectrum."
The bill is likely dead on arrival in the narrowly divided Senate, with every Democrat and at least one Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, expected to oppose it.
But its passage through the House with unanimous support from the Republican caucus—whose members claim to be driven by a desire to prevent noncitizens from voting, which is already unlawful, and combat voter fraud, which is virtually nonexistent—alarmed rights advocates.
"This obvious attack on our voting rights is based on completely unfounded claims," said Alison Gill, director of nominations and democracy at the National Women’s Law Center. "The lawmakers supporting this measure clearly aim to suppress the votes of women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people in order to rig elections and remain in power."
“It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, which means that the SAVE Act 2.0 creates a convoluted and dystopian solution to a problem that does not actually exist," Gill added. "Americans strongly opposed legislation when Congress considered this issue last year, and yet the congressional Republicans are trying to double down on this deceptive policy."
"The forces that are driving the Trump administration’s anti-voter agenda are also pressuring Congress to pass legislation that would silence millions of Americans."
Analysts estimate that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to the documents the Republican legislation would require people to furnish in order to register to vote, such as a passport and a birth certificate. The Brennan Center for Justice notes that the measure "would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately. Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard."
In addition to strict documentary requirements for registration and voting, the bill would force states to conduct frequent purges of their voter rolls and share information with the Department of Homeland Security in a purported effort to verify voters' citizenship—changes that could disenfranchise many eligible voters. The legislation would also establish criminal penalties for election workers who register voters without the required documentary proof of citizenship.
Bruce Spiva, senior vice president at Campaign Legal Center, noted that the GOP's renewed voter suppression push "comes as the FBI is seizing ballots from the 2020 election, President Trump is calling for our elections to be ‘nationalized,’ and the US Department of Justice is suing more than 20 states to get access to voters’ private data."
"This is not a coincidence," said Spiva. "The forces that are driving the Trump administration’s anti-voter agenda are also pressuring Congress to pass legislation that would silence millions of Americans by making it harder to participate in our elections."
In an op-ed for the New York Times on Thursday, the Brennan Center's Sean Morales-Doyle warned that "the campaign to rig our elections is well underway."
"It will be incumbent on all of us—election officials, advocates, state law enforcement, and voters—to see the administration’s efforts for what they are and to fight back," wrote Morales-Doyle.
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Right-Wing Catholic Off Trump Religion Panel After Israel-Gaza Remarks at Antisemitism Event
"I will not be bullied," said Carrie Prejean Boller. "I have the religious freedom to refuse support for a government that is bombing civilians and starving families in Gaza, and that does not make me an antisemite."
Feb 11, 2026
A conservative Catholic was expelled from President Donald Trump's so-called Religious Liberty Commission this week over remarks at a hearing on antisemitism in which she pushed back against those who conflate criticism of Israel and its genocidal war on Gaza with hatred of Jewish people.
Religious Liberty Commission Chair Dan Patrick, who is also Texas' Republican lieutenant governor, announced Wednesday that Carrie Prejean Boller had been ousted from the panel, writing on X that "no member... has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue."
"This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our hearing on antisemitism in America," he claimed. "This was my decision."
Patrick added that Trump "respects all faiths"—even though at least 13 of the commission's remaining 15 members are Christian, only one is Jewish, and none are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or other religions to which millions of Americans adhere. A coalition of faith groups this week filed a federal lawsuit over what one critic described as the commission's rejection of "our nation’s religious diversity and prioritizing one narrow set of conservative ‘Judeo-Christian’ beliefs."
Noting that Israeli forces have killed "tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza," Prejean Boller asked panel participant and University of California Los Angeles law student Yitzchok Frankel, who is Jewish, "In a country built on religious liberty and the First Amendment, do you believe someone can stand firmly against antisemitism... and at the same time, condemn the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, or reject political Zionism, or not support the political state of Israel?"
"Or do you believe that speaking out about what many Americans view as genocide in Gaza should be treated as antisemitic?" added Prejean Boller, who also took aim at the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, which has been widely condemned for conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.
Frankel replied "yes" to the assertion that anti-Zionism is antisemitic.
Prejean Boller also came under fire for wearing pins of US and Palestinian flags during Monday's hearing.
"I wore an American flag pin next to a Palestinian flag as a moral statement of solidarity with civilians who are being bombed, displaced, and deliberately starved in Gaza," Prejean Boller said Tuesday on X in response to calls for her resignation from the commission.
"I did this after watching many participants ignore, minimize, or outright deny what is plainly visible: a campaign of mass killing and starvation of a trapped population," she continued. "Silence in the face of that is not religious liberty, it is moral complicity. My Christian faith calls on me to stand for those who are suffering [and] in need."
"Forcing people to affirm Zionism as a condition of participation is not only wrong, it is directly contrary to religious freedom, especially on a body created to protect conscience," Prejean Boller stressed. "As a Catholic, I have both a constitutional right and a God-given freedom of religion and conscience not to endorse a political ideology or a government that is carrying out mass civilian killing and starvation."
Zionism is the movement for a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine—their ancestral birthplace—under the belief that God gave them the land. It has also been criticized as a settler-colonial and racist ideology, as in order to secure a Jewish homeland, Zionists have engaged in ethnic cleansing, occupation, invasions, and genocide against Palestinian Arabs.
Prejean Boller was Miss California in 2009 and Miss USA runner-up that same year. She launched her career as a Christian activist during the latter pageant after she answered a question about same-sex marriage by saying she opposed it. Then-businessman Trump owned most of Miss USA at the time and publicly supported Prejean Boller, saying "it wasn't a bad answer."
Since then, Prejean Boller has been known for her anti-LGBTQ+ statements and for paying parents and children for going without masks during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) commended Prejean Boller Wednesday "for using her position to oppose conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and encourage solidarity between Muslims, Christians, and Jews," calling her "one of a growing number of Americans, including political conservatives, who recognize that corrupted politicians have been trying to silence and smear Americans critical of the Israeli government under the guise of countering antisemitism."
"We also condemn Texas Lt. Gov. Patrick’s baseless and predictable decision to remove her from the commission for refusing to conflate antisemitism with criticism of the Israel apartheid government," CAIR added.
In her statement Tuesday, Prejean Boller said, "I will not be bullied."
"I have the religious freedom to refuse support for a government that is bombing civilians and starving families in Gaza, and that does not make me an antisemite," she insisted. "It makes me a pro-life Catholic and a free American who will not surrender religious liberty to political pressure."
"Zionist supremacy has no place on an American religious liberty commission," Prejean Boller added.
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