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insurance
Insurance Giant Chubb Breaks 2019 Coal Pledge: Report
"It's absurd for Chubb to continue to underwrite activities that are causing climate change and then turn around and pay for the claims and payouts caused by these activities," said one critic.
Jul 23, 2025
Chubb's 2019 decision to stop underwriting new coal projects or offering policies to businesses that generate more than 30% of their revenue or energy production from the fossil fuel was welcomed as a "major step forward" that could pressure other insurance giants to follow suit—but six years later, Wednesday reporting revealed that the company "has reversed its stance."
"It appears to have broken that pledge last week by reinsuring Nghi Son 2, a 1.2GW power plant on Vietnam's coast fueled entirely by coal," The Bureau of Investigative Journalism detailed. "Nghi Son 2 could emit up to 175 million metric tons of CO2 over 25 years—more than the annual emissions of the Philippines—according to Global Energy Monitor, which tracks energy data."
While Chubb CEO Evan Greenberg said six years ago that the company recognizes the reality of climate change and the substantial impact of human activity on our planet," neither the insurer nor Nghi Son 2 Power responded to the outlet's requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Giovanna Eichner, shareholder advocate at Green Century Capital Management, which holds shares in the insurer, said that "it's absurd for Chubb to continue to underwrite activities that are causing climate change and then turn around and pay for the claims and payouts caused by these activities."
In fact, the outlet highlighted, Chubb stopped covering wildfire-prone areas of California in 2021. Experts at the advocacy groups As You Sow and the Consumer Federation of America called out Chubb for contravening its coal policy—and doing so while ditching customers who need coverage in the face of extreme weather made worse by the continued use of fossil fuels.
Chubb, one of the world’s largest insurers, was one of the first to stop covering coal-projects, pledging to ‘do its part as a steward of Earth’But it has now become the lead reinsurer for a coal-fired power plant in Vietnam
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— The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (@tbij.bsky.social) July 23, 2025 at 7:07 AM
It's not immediately clear what Chubb's reported move in Vietnam will mean for other decisions. For example, as with the 2019 coal announcement, the insurer was praised by climate, environmental, and Indigenous rights defenders last year for abandoning a highly controversial methane gas project on the Texas Gulf Coast after facing months of grassroots community pressure.
Wednesday's reporting comes after a working paper published last month by a trio of researchers at the University of Zurich explained that insurers adopting restrictions on coal were accelerating the shift away from it.
Writing about the findings on Substack, longtime climate campaigner Peter Bosshard noted that "the Insure Our Future campaign has pressured the insurance industry to shift away from coal and other fossil fuels since 2017. We have seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that the restrictions which insurers adopted during this period have created bottlenecks for coal companies and made it impossible to build new coal power plants in much of the world."
"Through freedom of information requests, the Zurich researchers managed to access 9,745 insurance policies across 456 mines during the 2014-24 period, covering more than three-quarters of U.S. coal production," he continued. "Based on this data, they can for the first time offer hard evidence on the impact of insurers' coal restrictions."
While the paper identifies two exceptions to the overall trend—Lloyd's and Zurich—the researchers still concluded that insurers' policies can limit coal mining activity. Given that, Bosshard asserted that "insurance companies should use their clout to accelerate not just the shift away from coal, but also from oil and gas."
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How Louisiana Advocates Are Continuing to Fight the Trump-Backed LNG Boom
"We always have had to take matters into our own hands, and we have protected ourselves against enormous companies," one local campaigner said.
Apr 30, 2025
Louisiana advocates and their allies are not giving up in their fight to stop the liquefied natural gas buildout that threatens the health and well-being of Gulf Coast communities—not to mention the stability of the global climate—even as the Trump administration doubles down on its commitment to expanding LNG infrastructure.
In a briefing on Tuesday, community members, local advocates, and international campaigners shared how they would continue to push back against Venture Global, an LNG company that has amassed a record of ecosystem destruction and air pollution violations at its currently operating Calcasieu Pass export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Despite this, the Trump administration's Department of Energy granted conditional approval for the company’s nearby Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), undoing the pause that the outgoing Biden administration had placed on it and other LNG approvals as it considered the public interest ramifications of LNG exports.
Yet Gulf Coast campaigners, who are used to dealing with a lax regulatory environment at the state level, were not defeated.
"Anybody who reports here in Louisiana regularly understands that we've never been protected by our regulatory environment. Never," Anne Rolfes, who directs the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told reporters. "And so we always have had to take matters into our own hands, and we have protected ourselves against enormous companies."
Misadventure Global
One key strategy that the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and others have used to get around the regulatory rubber stamping of bad actors is to raise public awareness of how the companies turning coastal Louisiana into a sacrifice zone really operate.
Case in point is Venture Global. Rolfe and John Allaire—a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who lives next door to the Calcasieu Pass terminal—laid out its short but extensive record of environmental violations and unethical business practices.
Even before the original Calcasieu Pass began exporting, in January 2022, it had to clear a space for tankers to access the facility.
"It's understood that this is a volatile fuel to lock into, that you don't want to rely on a fuel that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump control."
"They pumped hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of black viscous sludge from their marine berth out into the front of the Gulf of Mexico," Allaire said. "And that was the first indication of what was to come with Venture Global."
Since it began operating, the company has added air, noise, and light pollution to the water pollution that has devastated local fisheries.
Allaire has taken hundreds of videos and photos of flaring incidents.
"The light pollution is unbelievable," he said. "At night, I can literally read a book when the flares are going, and I'm over a mile away from their flare stacks."
Allaire's observations are backed up by the official record. In June 2023, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality sent Venture Global a compliance order detailing over 2,000 air permit violations from its first 10 months of operation, Allaire said. The company has yet to resolve the complaint, and the state sent them a warning letter in March covering their 2024 and 2025 rule-breaking.
The company also has a history of failing to report its flares and other excess emissions to the Department of Environmental Quality as required by the Clean Air Act.
If they reported and then investigated their violations, "that would enable them to really understand what's happening at their facility so that they could prevent future problems," Rolfe said. "They absolutely aren't doing that."
In March, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and the Habitat Recovery Project notified Venture Global of intent to sue the company over Clean Air Act violations at its Calcasieu Pass facility.
But the environmental groups aren't the only ones suing Venture Global. The company stretched its commissioning phase—during which it is considered still in the process of establishing itself and can sell its products to the highest bidder rather than honoring its contracts—for three years and three months, beginning normal operations just this April.
"This is absolutely off from the industry norm," Rolfe said.
Now, other major fossil fuel companies, including Shell and BP, are pursuing arbitration claims against Venture Global for breach of contract. Investors have joined a class-action lawsuit against it, saying it violated federal securities law by misrepresenting its prospects.
Yet Venture Global has huge ambitions for the region. In addition to Calcasieu Pass and CP2, it wants to build three other export terminals in coastal Louisiana and more than triple its capacity from 30 million tons per annum (MTPA) of liquid gas—already over a quarter of the 88 MTPA exported by the U.S. exports in 2024—to 104 MTPA.
"As a review, they're flouting the Clean Air Act. They've manipulated the commissioning phase. They're being sued by everybody they've done business with. Is this a company that our country and our state should put such faith in?" Rolfe asked.
She answered her own question: "Of course, our answer is no."
Stall Tactics
Another strategy the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and their allies seek to employ is to delay Venture Global's ambitions long enough for the economic reality of the LNG boom to catch up with it.
In addition to the approval of CP2, Australian company Woodside announced on Monday that it had approved a Louisiana LNG project worth $17.5 billion. Yet the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis concluded in April that the massive growth in LNG capacity would exceed dwindling demand within two years.
"It's understood that this is a volatile fuel to lock into, that you don't want to rely on a fuel that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump control. So people are trying to get off of gas," Rolfe said.
"The economics are going to catch up with them. I just want it to be before they destroy the coast of Louisiana."
This means that LNG companies like Woodside and Venture Global are behaving "like a kid in a candy store," Rolfe continued. "That kid, unchecked, will eat so much, they'll throw up. I think the same is true with this industry. Unchecked, it will do itself harm."
The key is therefore to stall the buildout long enough that many projects become infeasible. This tactic has worked for frontline communities during the first Trump administration, Rolfe said. Through a combination of public pressure, records requests, and legal action, community advocates were able to delay the construction of a plastic plant proposed by the Chinese company Wanhua Chemical U.S. Operation, LLC, which would have released the World War 1-era nerve gas phosgene into the already pollution-burdened St. James Parish.
The economic outlook for the plant had always been "dubious" Rolfe said, and eventually the company gave up on trying to build it.
"They could have gotten approval and gotten on their way within a month. But our suit and then our constant presence and making them table things and so forth, drew it out and let the economics catch up with them," Rolfe said.
Rolfe added that the gas industry has similarly gotten ahead of itself.
"They're greedy, right? They want to grab all the candy they can, and the economics are going to catch up with them. I just want it to be before they destroy the coast of Louisiana."
Very Risk Business
Another strategy to slow down the building of new LNG facilities like CP2 is to target the one thing, in addition to permits and funds, that they can't move forward without: insurance.
Insurance is one sector in which the economic impact of the climate crisis is already being felt, as Ethan Nuss, senior energy finance campaigner at Rainforest Action Network, explained.
For example, major insurer Chubb earns $1.5 billion a year in premiums from the fossil fuel industry, which was already canceled out early this year with the $1.5 billion in pre-tax losses they took from the Los Angeles wildfires. On a local level, some insurers have pulled out of Louisiana all together to avoid insuring against climate-fueled extreme weather events.
"Once they are really educated about the permit violations and the legal risks and the true risk landscape that they're facing by taking on this client, many of them are very concerned."
"This is not a time to build something like CP2 that would deepen the climate crisis," Nuss said.
Because insurers are on the books for both fossil fuel projects and the damage for climate disasters, and because many of them have climate and human rights policies, they are vulnerable to growing pressure from the climate movement to drop the oil and gas clients costing them so much money.
RAN in February published the names of the major insurers for Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass, which it obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. These included Chubb subsidiary ACE American Insurance Company, AIG subsidiary National Union Fire Insurance Co., Allianz, Swiss Re, AXA, and Tokio Marine subsidiary Houston Casualty Company.
"That has kicked off a global effort to reach out to those insurers and begin to educate them about what is happening in Southwest Louisiana, the impacts from Calcasieu Pass, and what associated risks they're facing," Nuss said.
As a result of these efforts, Swiss Re has agreed to meet with the fishing community of Southwest Louisiana, to talk about the "devastating impacts on their livelihoods" from Calcasieu Pass' operations.
"Often with these global financial institutions, they aren't fully aware of what's really happening on the ground. That client is maybe just another line on the spreadsheet. But once they really start hearing the stories, once they are really educated about the permit violations and the legal risks and the true risk landscape that they're facing by taking on this client, many of them are very concerned," Nuss said.
Nuss hopes that, once fully informed, insurers would decide any project of Venture Global's is a "very risky business that they don't want to be involved in."
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Public Banking in a Time of Crisis: How to Rebuild Los Angeles
From LA’s wildfires to Asheville’s floods, disasters are intensifying and demand resilience. Public banking offers a blueprint for recovery: leverage public dollars to cut long-term costs, create jobs, and rebuild smarter.
Feb 04, 2025
On the night of January 7th, as the Palisades Fire surged to 2,000 acres to the west and the Eaton Fire exploded to 1,000 to the east, I joined thousands fleeing hurricane-force winds that hurled embers for miles. But while I evacuated out of precaution, across Los Angeles, many Angelenos were not as fortunate. Like so many here, I spent those first sleepless nights glued to wall-to-wall news coverage, tracking the fires’ paths. But while flames dominated headlines, a slower crisis burns, one that Los Angeles has yet to confront.
Caught in a cycle of destruction and recovery that grows more urgent every year, fire season is no longer a season—it’s a year-round threat. Entire neighborhoods in Altadena have lost more than homes—they’ve watched their generational wealth turn to rubble. In Pacific Palisades, emergency teams scrambled to stabilize hillsides before landslides erased what remained. With wildfire losses now climbing past $250 billion, one question echoes through the city: Who pays to rebuild? And how can we do it faster, smarter, without sinking deeper into debt?
Los Angeles isn’t the first to face this reckoning. Back in 1997, Grand Forks, North Dakota, suffered a catastrophic flood. Their city was left in ruins, but they had something most cities don’t: the Bank of North Dakota (BND), America’s only state-owned public bank. Within two weeks, the BND funneled around $70 million in credit for emergency operations and rebuilding. While FEMA took months to distribute aid, the BND’s local presence and public mandate allowed it to act with precision. ND mortgage holders got six-month payment pauses. Show me one Wall Street bank that’s offered that kind of breathing room.
Caught in a cycle of destruction and recovery that grows more urgent every year, fire season is no longer a season—it’s a year-round threat.
This is the power of public banking: swift, people-focused, and designed for crisis response. Unlike profit-driven institutions, a public bank—owned by a city or state—would reinvest public deposits into local resilience rather than shareholder dividends. Imagine transforming tax dollars into a renewable resource: funding fire-resistant infrastructure, upgrading aging power grids, and keeping families housed during disasters.
Look around Los Angeles today. Insurers flee high-risk areas, leaving families stranded. Meanwhile, we’re sending more than $1.4 billion a year in debt service fees to Wall Street—this staggering sum, outlined in the City’s 2024/25 Adopted Budget (Page R-71), is money that could fortify hillsides or retrofit homes. Governor Newsom’s $2.5 billion wildfire package helps clear debris, but it doesn’t address the bigger question: How do we fund tomorrow’s disasters without predatory loans that bleed the city dry?
A public bank is the answer. Picture the Bank of North Dakota model scaled for a metropolis. Need emergency credit after the next natural disaster? Done. Low-interest loans for small businesses distributing supplies mid-crisis? No delays. By partnering with local lenders, a public bank could bridge the gap for families waiting months or years for insurance payouts.
This is the power of public banking: swift, people-focused, and designed for crisis response.
This isn’t fantasy. A national public banking movement is rising. In 2019, California passed the Public Banking Act, clearing the legal path for cities like Los Angeles to establish their own public banks. New York City plans a public bank to fund affordable housing and support minority communities. Florida eyes the model for local control of state resources. From San Francisco to New Jersey, cities and states recognize that megabanks can’t meet the scale of today’s economic and environmental challenges. Public institutions keep dollars local, funding fire-resilient housing, green energy projects, and businesses that anchor communities during crises.
During COVID-19, the Bank of North Dakota proved this again. While Wall Street prioritized corporations, the BND partnered with community banks to quickly deliver relief to small businesses and frontline workers. Los Angeles deserves that same agility. A public bank could centralize disaster funds, slash bureaucratic delays, and ensure every dollar stays local—rebuilding neighborhoods instead of enriching distant shareholders.
Housing offers another critical test. Today, financing affordable projects takes years as developers navigate a maze of private lenders. A public bank could create a housing fast-track fund, offering below-market loans for shovel-ready developments. Interest payments would recycle into future projects, not Wall Street bonuses. Streamlined funding means lower costs, faster construction, and more Angelenos housed before the next disaster strikes.
The fight isn’t about resources—it’s about control. A public bank keeps investments local, ensuring funds flow to priorities like firebreaks and microgrids rather than stock buybacks.
Critics argue public banks risk politicization. But the BND’s 105-year track record in a solidly red state disproves this: it's rated A+ by S&P with an 18.2% return on equity in 2023. It’s safer than most big banks and exceptionally stable as a public institution. By law, California’s public banks won’t compete with local community banks, instead, they will partner with them, expanding access to credit in underserved communities.
The money to capitalize a public bank exists. We’ve already raised billions for disaster recovery. The fight isn’t about resources—it’s about control. A public bank keeps investments local, ensuring funds flow to priorities like firebreaks and microgrids rather than stock buybacks.
From LA’s wildfires to Asheville’s floods, disasters are intensifying and demand resilience. Public banking offers a blueprint for recovery: leverage public dollars to cut long-term costs, create jobs, and rebuild smarter.
Los Angeles can lead this revolution. By creating the nation’s first major urban public bank, we’ll pioneer a model for cities nationwide. When the next disaster strikes, we won’t be at the mercy of for-profit banks, we’ll have the tools to rebuild ourselves—faster, fairer, and permanently stronger. The alternative is unthinkable: another decade of rubble, debt, and avoidable loss.
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