By Last month, RAN and allies launched a campaign to get insurance giant Liberty Mutual to stop driving climate change. Insurers like Liberty Mutual are contributing to the climate crisis by insuring and investing in fossil fuels, but these same companies can single-handedly stop new coal plants, tar sands pipelines and oil wells by simply refusing to insure them.
Under pressure from the climate movement, 17 of the biggest insurers have already adopted policies to ditch the coal sector and four won’t insure tar sands. But Boston-based insurance giant Liberty Mutual has not yet taken any steps on fossil fuels, or even acknowledged its role in fueling the crisis.
Our new campaign is taking action to change that. On Tuesday, October 8, mothers, youth activists and street performers came together outside Liberty Mutual’s headquarters in Boston to demand that the company stop fueling the climate crisis. RAN joined up with Mothers Out Front, 350 Massachusetts, Greenpeace, and Sunrise Movement Boston to flyer, chant, and sing during lunchtime. We let employees know what their company is complicit in and how far it is lagging behind global insurance peers.
And thanks to your support, Liberty Mutual felt the pressure from all sides. You sent more than 10,500 emails to key executives and made 110 calls to corporate headquarters. One week later, across the Atlantic, activists with Extinction Rebellion blockaded the entrance to Liberty Mutual’s London office to protest the company’s support for coal. Liberty Mutual definitely heard us!
However, Liberty Mutual refuses to even acknowledge our campaign. RAN and the Insure Our Future campaign have written to Liberty Mutual more than fifteen times since July 2018, requesting to sit down and discuss its support for the fossil fuel industry. In response, we’ve received nothing.
We need to show Liberty Mutual that they can no longer continue with business as usual. We must make our demands impossible to ignore. We have to demonstrate to the company that they cannot continue to insure tar sands projects like the Trans Mountain pipeline and invest in coal projects like the Baralaba coal mine in Australia.
That’s why we’re taking this campaign to the next level, and we need your help:
- Want to let Liberty Mutual know what you think? Give the company a call, and use our short script to leave a complaint. Or help us flood the email inboxes of CEO David Long and other key executives.
- Do you live in Boston or Seattle? We’re building up teams in and around Boston, where Liberty Mutual is headquartered, and Seattle, where it has a big office. If you’re in Boston, fill out this form to stay in the loop about upcoming actions, or this form for Seattle.
- Do you live in a city or town anywhere in the world? Even if you’re not in Massachusetts, you can organize to get your town or city to adopt a policy that favors buying its municipal insurance from companies that have taken action on fossil fuels, as San Francisco has already done.
- Are you thinking about working in the insurance field? Add your voice to this petition calling on your industry to take action, and check out the powerful words in Teen Vogue from the risk management student that started the petition.
The campaign is just getting started, and we’ll be taking action until Liberty Mutual adopts a policy to ditch coal and tar sands. See you in the streets!
