Call to un-insure Trans Mountain’s pipeline

From STAND.EARTH
We have exactly five weeks to knock off Trans Mountain’s remaining insurers before its August 31st deadline to secure coverage – and we’re starting with Chubb. Without insurance, the pipeline can’t go ahead.
Chubb’s CEO Evan Greenberg is one of the few U.S. insurance executives who has been outspoken about the industry’s need to tackle the climate crisis, so we know the company is sensitive to its public image on climate. Yet Chubb also increased its coverage for the Trans Mountain tar sands pipeline in 2020. Getting this company to fold would be a major blow for the struggling pipeline, but more public pressure is needed to make it happen.
Will you help turn up the heat on Chubb by sending a targeted email directly to Evan Greenberg and other senior executives, urging them to drop Trans Mountain? EMAIL CHUBB!
Chubb claims to be a ‘climate leader’ because in 2019 it became the first in the U.S. to adopt a policy ruling out coverage for coal. At the time, Chubb’s CEO even said that Chubb’s coal policy reflected “Chubb’s commitment to do [its] part as a steward of the earth.” But when you take off the greenwash glasses, the reality is a little darker. Chubb is still one of the world’s top eight insurers of oil and gas, and has refused to comment on its coverage for Trans Mountain. This hypocrisy is outrageous – but it can provide important leverage for pushing the company to live up to its own climate commitments by extending its policy on coal to tar sands projects like Trans Mountain. Pressure from within the insurance industry is building too. Since the start of this global campaign, fourteen insurers have cut ties with Trans Mountain – making Chubb look more like an industry laggard than a leader. In fact, the pipeline has been having such a hard time finding coverage that it asked the Canada Energy Regulator to protect its insurers from our campaign by keeping their identities a secret. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: a project that can only be insured in secret has lost its social license to operate. Now it’s up to us to show Chubb – a known insurer before the secrecy request was granted – that insuring Trans Mountain is simply too big a risk. Click here to email Chubb’s CEO and senior executives and help flood their inboxes with messages to drop Trans Mountain. I’ll be the first to admit that insurance is an unusual strategy for stopping the Trans Mountain pipeline. Honestly, I never expected it would be as successful as it has been so far. But the momentum we’ve been building together on this campaign is nothing short of incredible. Just last month, we all participated in a global week of action to un-insure Trans Mountain – joining forces with people across four continents and ten countries to pull off over twenty-five protests and hundreds of thousands of online actions. Now we’re approaching the crunch period for getting more insurers over the line, with the August 31st deadline for securing coverage just around the corner. We don’t have much time but remember that Trans Mountain’s biggest insurer, Zurich, caved to public pressure and dropped the pipeline at this same time last year. Let’s do to Chubb what we did to Zurich. Let’s un-insure Trans Mountain. Thanks for taking action, Sven Biggs
Canadian Oil and Gas Programs Director
Stand.earth