Insurance Companies Cancelling Home Owner Insurance Are Supporting LNG Terminals – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 7th June 2025, 11:58 am

The same insurance companies that are refusing to insure homes in many areas of the US because of climate related risks are doubling down on insuring LNG terminals that will make global heating worse. Talk about being two-faced! The problem is, the insurance companies are making so much money from the LNG projects that they have locked their consciences, their morals, their scruples, and their cojones in a vault and thrown away the key.

People who live along the Gulf Coast from Port Arthur, Texas, to Lake Charles, Louisiana, have learned the hard way that fossil fuel and petrochemical companies have sacrificed them on the altar of greed. Nevertheless, they think they may get leverage over the insurance companies by subjecting them to public shaming. The Rainforest Action Network is helping their cause.

With the failed US president now floundering his way through a second term, almost two dozen new LNG terminals or expansions of existing ones are being pushed forward with the active encouragement of the US government. Most of them are located near Port Arthur, Texas, and Cameron Parish, Louisiana, areas where the residents are primarily Black or Brown and poor.

These are called “sacrifice zones,” which are defined by the UN as “extremely contaminated areas where vulnerable and marginalized groups bear a disproportionate burden of the health, human rights and environmental consequences of exposure to pollution and hazardous substances.” According to Truthout, research shows local Black, Brown, and Indigenous workers do not benefit equitably from the jobs and other economic benefits the fossil fuel industry often promises when building new facilities.

The Rainforest Action Network issued a report in April that made use of data from Freedom of Information requests and court filing to put together a picture of the insurers who are making the LNG expansion in the Gulf of Mexico possible. It says some of the insurers behind one of the projects, known as Cameron LNG, are Chubb, AIG, Allianz, Liberty Mutual, Munich Re, Swiss Re, Zurich, Tokio Marine, and The Hartford, among others. Over the past decade, banks and investors such as JPMorgan, Citi, BlackRock, and Vanguard have also funded such projects.

“The banks and the insurance companies are the ones actually supporting the fossil fuel industry behind the scenes,” Ruth Breech of RAN told Truthout. “They’re financing and insuring environmental racism because these projects are overwhelmingly situated in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities they feel are the path of least resistance,” added Roishetta Ozane, a community organizer in Lake Charles, Louisiana. She told Truthout, “We get all the cumulative impacts living in a fenceline community. My children have asthma and eczema. My son has epilepsy, which I believe was exacerbated by the pollution from the facilities.”

Over time, she started making connections between the environmental racism, the extreme weather her community experienced, and the wider climate crisis and realized they were all associated with local industries. “I was trying to connect the dots for people. All of these facilities are releasing gas into the air, and it’s what’s warming our planet. It’s what’s causing these storms to be more severe.” Isn’t it amazing how something can be so blindingly obvious to ordinary people but beyond the ability of supposedly educated people to comprehend? Money will do that.

“If our elected officials are going to approve these projects, then our hope lies in the banks and the investors and the insurance companies. We bring folks in front of these banks and insurance companies to say you’re insuring and financing environmental racism,” Ozane said.

Both Breech and Ozane put a spotlight on the hypocrisy of the insurance industry. “We’re seeing people across the nation lose their home insurance coverage because of the impacts of climate change. Then we’re seeing these insurance companies continue to provide insurance for new fossil fuel projects,” said Breech. “For insurance companies to insure one of these climate monsters, and then turn around and not insure the people who live in the communities at a reasonable rate, is outright wrong,” Ozane added.

Chubb On LNG

Chubb is mentioned prominently in the Truthout report because it is considered an industry leader. To be fair, it has backed away from insuring some methane projects where its peers have not. In 2024, it dropped 32 major oil and gas clients who didn’t meet its methane emissions standards. It has also declined to insure Rio Grande LNG, a proposed export terminal in Brownsville, Texas, and ruled out insuring the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. As recently reported by Inside Climate News, the company has also declined to insure Calcasieu Pass LNG, a project of Venture Global.

Kudos to Chubb for those decisions, but Ozane wants it to do more. Specifically, she wants it to decline coverage for another Venture Global project known as CP2. According to the Sierra Club LNG Export Tracker, the annual emissions from CP2 will equal those of 54 coal-fired generating stations once it is completed. Chubb has declined to say whether it is insuring CP2.

“If you’re insuring this project, you’re ensuring this community’s destruction. It would be easy for Chubb to say, if CP2 gets all of its permits, we’re not going to insure them,” Ozane said. Rainforest Action Network concluded its April 2025 report this way:

“A human rights due diligence process would inform Banks and Insurance companies to act swiftly; stopping support for any methane export terminal that exacerbates environmental  injustice to ensure that low-income communities and/or communities of color are not suffering  disproportionately from hazardous pollution. Financial institutions have a responsibility ensuring the projects they support do not entrench these systemic harms, by providing any direct or indirect financial services or insurance coverage to the operating and proposed methane export terminal projects in Southwest Louisiana. The impact of this would save lives and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of residents.

“To curb the deepest impacts of climate change, banks and insurance companies must stop support, through any direct or indirect means for fossil fuel expansion, in line with the conclusions of the International Energy Agency “Net Zero by 2050” report. Banks and financial institutions must align their overall corporate policy, portfolios and dealbooks with a 1.5 degree global temperature scenario.”

A Legal Victory For The Environment In Louisiana

The impact of the oil and gas industry on coastal areas in Louisiana has been extreme. Much of the land that borders the Gulf is made up of estuaries that act as a transition zone between the freshwater inland and the seawater next door. Those estuaries act as filters that remove pollutants from the water and are home to an amazing variety of aquatic animals and shore birds. But they often interfere with the ability of oil and gas companies to move their drilling rigs about, and so the companies have routinely torn new channels through the area to make it easier to move their equipment.

According to the US Geological Survey, Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are among the most critically endangered environments in the US. From 1932 to 2016, about 25 percent of the land along the coast of Louisiana — 1900 square miles — was lost. Much of that loss is attributed to the channel through the bayous created by oil and gas companies. Those channels allow storm surges from hurricanes to move directly inland, bypassing the bayous that have protected the coastline for millennia. According to the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the state could lose another 3,000 square miles of coastal land over the next 50 years.

In 1978, Louisiana passed legislation that said sites used by oil companies must “be cleared, re-vegetated, detoxified, and otherwise restored as near as practicable to their original condition” after they were completed. In 2013, the parish of Plaquemines sued Chevron, the parent company of Texaco, claiming it was in violation of that state statute. On June 5, 2025, a jury awarded the parish $744 million in damages — $575 million for land loss, $161 million for contamination, and $8.6 million for abandoned equipment.

The jury found that Texaco violated state regulations and contributed to the disappearing coastline by dredging canals, drilling wells, and dumping massive amounts of wastewater into the marsh, which in Louisiana is known as a bayou. The attorney for the parish told the jurors Chevron did not consider the land worth preserving. That apparently did not sit well with the members or the jury.

Mike Phillips, an attorney for Chevron, said after the verdict was read that the company intends to appeal. According to a report by The Guardian, he claimed that Chevron was “not the cause of the land loss” and that the law does not apply to “conduct that occurred decades before the law was enacted.” He called the verdict “unjust,” and claimed there were “numerous legal errors.” Maybe in another decade or so those appeals will be exhausted and Chevron will actually have to pay some of the money the jury said is owed the parish.

But it won’t be Chevron’s money, of course. The money will come from the insurance companies that did business with Chevron over the years. That, combined with the civic activism by RAN and Roishetta Ozane, may finally convince those insurance companies to withdraw their support for oil and gas activities in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hat tip to Dan Allard.