If you feel like you’ve heard less from us recently, there’s a good reason for that. We’ve been deep in campaign research, developing what we think will be a central pillar of our strategy for the next several years.
We’re not ready to announce our plans yet, but we can say that we’re looking very closely at the insurance industry.
It may be one of the dullest industries on earth, but the insurance industry is a key player in the energy transition, one that could hasten the end of fossil fuels, or slow down the energy transition considerably.
Between 2004 and 2024, one-third of all weather-related payouts made by the industry ― totalling $600 billion ― could be directly attributed to climate change.
In a sane world, this would push insurance companies to recognize that Big Oil poses an existential threat to its business model, cease their support of oil and gas, and scale up support of renewables.
Instead, insurance companies, such as State Farm, Chubb, and Liberty Mutual, are passing the full costs of the climate crisis onto their customers ― and doubling down on oil and gas.
Between 2019 to 2025, insurance companies hiked home insurance premiums by an average of 70 percent across the country, causing insurance costs to become a major challenge for millions of homeowners and prospective home buyers.
As many as 1 in 8 homeowners can no longer even get home insurance, leaving them financially exposed in the event of a climate-driven extreme weather event damaging their property.
At the same time as implementing record-breaking rate hikes, insurance industry CEOs are making more money than ever. In 2025 ― the most profitable year for the property and casualty insurance industry in decades ― the CEOs at the 10 largest insurers banked a whopping $134 million, a 27% increase from 2024.
And as Big Insurance sticks working- and middle-class Americans with the bill for the climate crisis, it’s fueling the flames of the climate crisis further still.
Insurance industry trade groups regularly lobby against climate policy and recently filed an amicus brief, siding with oil and gas companies in an impending Supreme Court case. Worse still, insurance companies continue to enable oil and gas expansion, both as a major investor in fossil fuels and by providing insurance coverage to new coal, oil, and gas projects.
U.S. insurance companies are also falling well behind their global peers in terms of revenue growth from renewables, as they fail to insure clean energy projects.
So to summarize, here we have an industry that’s:
Making life less affordable for tens of millions of Americans
Making record profits and boosting CEO pay
Fueling the climate crisis by lobbying against climate policy, backing oil and gas expansion, and failing to adequately support the clean energy sector
Fortunately, unlike every other pillar of the financial industry, insurance companies are regulated at the state level.
That means that any state legislature or Insurance Commissioner that cares about stopping the climate crisis and protecting people from the predations of corporate greed can pass legislation and regulations curtailing the industry to that effect.
A lot of these efforts are already in motion. In Connecticut, Senate Bill 453 would place a surcharge on the premiums insurance companies charge on fossil fuel projects to raise money for climate resilience projects. In California and Hawaii, campaigns are underway to get state Attorneys General to sue oil and gas companies to recoup the costs borne by consumers from climate-driven insurance premium rate hikes.
In New York, we’re building a coalition around the Insure our Communities Act. The strongest insurance-related, anti-oil and gas bill in the country, the Insure our Communities Act would compel any insurance company that wants a license to do business in the state of New York to stop underwriting new oil and gas projects.
But I’ve probably said enough for now. As I said at the start of this newsletter, we’re still in the process of developing our campaign plans.
Over the next month or two, we’ll be continuing to figure out the best way that we can take the fight to the insurance industry head on, fighting to get mega corporations like State Farm to pay their fair share for the climate crisis, take care of communities, and end their support of oil and gas.
If you want to support this work, you can make a donation here. We look forward to sharing more soon.
In Solidarity
- Alec Connon, Stop the Money Pipeline, coalition director.
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News and Updates from the Coalition
- Calls to Investigate Musk & DOGE gain traction
As it becomes clear that Musk’s dismantling of USAID has killed countless children around the world, our Investigate DOGE campaign has secured commitments from five Members of Congress to support investigations and hearings into Musk and DOGE in the new Congress ― Rep. Robert Garcia (CA), Rep. John B. Larson (CT), Rep. Ro Khanna (CA), Rep. James Talarico (TX), and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (NY).
But to make investigations and hearings into Musk and DOGE a reality, we need many more Members of Congress to stand up and fight to hold the world’s richest man to account.
Email your Members of Congress now and urge them to hold Musk and his DOGE bros to account.
– Santander backs off two dangerous LNG projects
In April, 33,000 of you sent emails to Santander’s leadership, demanding the bank stop financing new fossil fuels. In May, we joined Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch to meet their senior management and push them to stop backsliding on climate.
Now, in response to years of organizing from partners in Mexico and Latin America, Santander has felt the need to publish a statement claiming that it is not financing the controversial Saguaro and AMIGO LNG projects, both of which would threaten biodiverse marine ecosystems and lock in decades more fossil fuel pollution.
This claim contradicts a public statement made in October 2024 by the CEO of the company behind Saguaro LNG, who named Santander as one of the financial advisers for the project.
The fact that Santander now feels compelled to publicly distance itself from these toxic projects is a notable victory for the growing global campaign on Santander.
– Supporting state leadership through Local Leads, Global Impacts
Through our year-long leadership development program, Local Leads, Global Impacts, we have the honor of supporting and coaching a cohort of talented, dedicated campaigners across the country. One of the cohort members is 350 Seattle’s campaigns director, Aki Chatterji, who is leading the Make Polluters Pay WA campaign.
As 65,000 people are evacuated from Spokane in the face of terrifying wildfires, and Big Oil makes record profits, it’s never been clearer that Big Oil, not everyday people, should pay for the wildfire response and recovery in Spokane and elsewhere, and that Big Oil, not everyday people, should pay for the cooling centers, affordable clean energy, healthy housing and other climate resilience solutions our communities need to survive.
If you’re in Washington State, get plugged into the Make Polluters Pay WA campaign by sending an email to your state legislators urging them to Make Polluters Pay.
You can also find more ways to plug into the campaign here.
– Fighting Big Oil's attempts to win legal immunity
With arguments before the Supreme Court between the City & County of Boulder and Suncor and Exxon-Mobil set to begin on October 5th, Big Oil is desperately trying to win legal immunity from the many lawsuits and pieces of legislation seeking to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for their decades of lies, deception and pollution that have led us to the world of climate disasters we’re now living through. This includes efforts from Big Oil to pass a “legal immunity shield” in Congress, pass state bills invalidating climate lawsuits and legislation, and pleading their case in the courts.
Two weeks ago, more than 5,000 of you sent emails to your Members of Congress, urging them to sign onto an amicus brief on the side of Boulder in the impending SCOTUS case that starts in October. In response, more than 90 Members of Congress added their name to the legal briefing, the most sitting Members of Congress to ever sign on to such a legal maneuver.
Learn more & join the No Immunity for Big Oil campaign here.
– Aligning your money with your values
Last month’s annual Banking on Climate Chaos report reminded us just how bad the big Wall Street banks are: More than one-third of the $900+ billion commercial banks provided to fossil fuel companies in 2025 came from just ten US megabanks.
So, we were glad to see our partners at Green America also reminding us that you can ensure your money isn’t going into new fossil fuel projects by finding a better bank. Check out their amazing Get A Better Bank tool to learn how. Incredibly, every $1,000 in a major Wall Street bank has the emissions equivalent of a return flight between New York and Seattle.
– If bombing an elementary school isn't a redline. What is?
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently admitted he doesn’t know if Anthropic’s AI was used in the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School which killed nearly 200 people, including 120 children. Amodei also claimed that regardless of whether his company’s AI was used in the strike, it was not a violation of its use-case “redlines” because “a human made that final call, not Claude.”
To call out the role of AI companies in the Iranian school bombing and the US war machine, we teamed up with Tesla Takedown to deploy art-installation actions at the offices of Anthropic, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Tesla, leaving child-sized body bags, flowers, audio of bombings and children playing, and a banner that read: Stop AI School Bombings.
Because, at the end of the day, if bombing an elementary school full of children doesn’t cross one of your red lines, there’s something deeply wrong with you and your company.
– And, finally, keeping our eyes on Costco until we win
Costco’s 13 million co-branded credit cards are with Citibank, the #1 funder of toxic petrochemicals in the U.S. and one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuels. Costco’s contract, which is worth 13 million credit cards, goes up for bid next year, so we’re doing everything possible to let Costco know we want them to choose a better credit card partner!
If you’re in Texas and Louisiana, sign on to the Gulf South letter to Costco urging Costco to choose a credit card partner that is not destroying communities in the Gulf South.
If you’re in the Seattle area and want to canvass Costco headquarter employees, shoot our Seattle-based organizer Jake an email: jake@stopthemoneypipeline.org. And for all the latest updates, follow the campaign Instagram.
To close out this month’s newsletter, here’s Jake and the crew speaking about the campaign at a recent campaign event:
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