Risk Exposure: The Insurers Secretly Backing The Methane Gas Boom in the US Gulf South
Insurance companies are supposed to protect us from catastrophic risks. Yet when it comes to climate change, insurers perpetuate climate chaos and dependence on fossil fuels by insuring new coal, oil, and gas projects while raising premiums and abandoning communities that are hit by worsening and repeat climate disasters.
A glaring example of the insurance industry’s hypocrisy is its role in supporting dangerous Liquefied “Natural” Gas (LNG) terminals across the US Gulf South. (This report will use “methane” in place of LNG, as LNG is composed mostly of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.) New research reveals the insurers are propping up methane export terminals along the US Gulf Coast even as this wave of fossil fuel expansion perpetuates human rights harms and threatens to blow past the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. At least 35 insurance companies including AIG, AXA, Allianz, Chubb, Liberty Mutual, Lloyd’s of London, SCOR, and Sompo are among some of the insurers of these terminals. Information in this report – obtained through more than 50 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests – reveals for the first time the extent and scale of specific insurers’ direct complicity in the reckless expansion of methane.