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Extinction Rebellion (XR) campaigners are spending this week occupying the offices of major insurance firms in the City of London, demanding they stop insuring fossil fuel projects.
On Wednesday morning, climate activists occupied the offices of major insurers AIG Talbot in the City, as the movement’s ‘Insure Our Survival’ campaign staged its third day of protests in the UK’s leading financial district.
XR is demanding insurers stop insuring the oil, gas and coal projects “causing extreme weather like the terrifying floods currently devastating cities in Spain.”
Ten XR activists dressed in business suits entered the lobby of offices in Fenchurch Street where AIG Talbot – major insurers of fossil fuel projects – are headquartered.
They unfurled banners reading “AIG Stop Insuring climate criminals’, read out a statement demanding that the firm immediately stop insuring all fossil fuels, and handed out leaflets to staff asking them to pressure their bosses to “pull the plug on insuring the deadly expansion of oil, gas and coal exploration and production.”
Some of the activists blew up dozens of pink balloons and wrote messages on them “branding AIG’s executives climate criminals and asking them to help save our civilisation, rather than destroy it.”
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Outside the building, other protestors handed out leaflets to staff and held banners reading ‘Insure Our Survival’ and ‘Stop EACOP’, referring to the planned East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, what XR dubs a “planet-wrecking Carbon bomb that will only be possible if the developers can get insurance.” AIG Talbot has been contacted for comment.
It comes after five protestors were arrested on Tuesday as another insurer’s office was covered in chalk by activists.
The Gherkin building was occupied, and a video van tour of the City of London branded insurance CEOs ‘climate criminals’ on day two of Extinction Rebellion’s Insure Our Survival week.
Three activists in business suits entered the lobby of the glass and steel tower that is the HQ of the global reinsurance company SwissRe, which XR says is “heavily involved in the dirty business of insuring climate breakdown.”
They unfurled banners reading Insure Our Survival and ‘Stop EACOP’, another reference to the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline that insurance would make possible.
Tuesday also saw insurers WTW targeted. Their analysts co-authored a recent report that warned climate crisis-driven floods and extreme weather have a high likelihood of causing food shortages and social unrest in the UK. However, XR argues the firm makes millions from “helping fossil fuel crooks to get insurance to keep digging and drilling for the oil, gas and coal causing the climate emergency.”
Extinction Rebellion activists say it is a mark of “hypocrisy”.
A spokesperson for XR’s Insure Our Survival campaign said: “WTW were targeted because they may be one of the most hypocritical insurers in the UK. Shockingly, their experts publicly state that the climate crisis could cause food shortages and social unrest – and yet they keep sorting the fossil fuel companies with insurance to make the crisis worse and more likely to cost billions of lives.”
Throughout Tuesday, an advertising van playing videos depicting the CEOs of leading UK-based insurers as “climate criminals” toured the City of London.
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Insure Our Survival spokesperson Steve Tooze said: “Famine is already rife in countries in Africa, Asia and South and Central America due to floods and extreme weather caused by the climate crisis. It’s only a matter of time before food shortages and hunger hit the UK too. The floods are also leaving towns, homes, businesses and lives wrecked.
“We’re making it clear to insurers that they have the power to stop us going hungry and having our homes flooded and made uninsurable. They can make it impossible for fossil fuel bosses to keep drilling and digging by pulling the plug on the insurance that covers their huge financial losses if things go wrong.”
He added that unless insurers meet their demand to stop insuring new oil and gas, XR will “keep targeting them with mass non-violent direct action to damage their reputations with the public and business community and hit their share price.”
On Monday, the week of action kicked off as a pink boat sailed through the City of London.
Hundreds of Extinction Rebellion activists occupied buildings, staged “climate crime scenes and mass die”-ins and marched to demand insurers stop “insuring climate breakdown.”
Extinction Rebellion occupied the iconic Walkie Talkie tower, and sailed the pink boat through the streets of the City of London that was made famous in the group’s launch in central London in 2019.
Protesters this time were holding smoke flares and wearing extreme wet weather gear.
The Walkie Talkie building is home to insurers Ascot, Talbot, Chaucer, Markel, Allied World, CNA Hardy, Tokio Ma