Extinction Rebellion announces its Insure Our Survival campaign by issuing an ultimatum letter to insurance industry bosses as the movement prepares a week of protests and actions in London and across the UK.

An ultimatum letter from Extinction Rebellion (XR) today (Monday) landed in the inboxes of senior executives at all the UK-based insurance companies who continue to insure climate breakdown warning: “Make a pledge to get out of new oil, coal and gas – or face actions and protests.”

Thousands of ordinary members of the public supporting XR’s Insure Our Survival campaign will flood into the City of London from October 28 to target insurers with a wave of nonviolent direct actions designed to highlight their complicity in mass death and destruction to the world.

After three days of intensive action in the capital, the campaign will spread out to target the offices of insurers in towns and cities across the UK, demanding that insurers pull the plug on the insurance that allows fossil fuel criminals to keep digging and drilling for the products that are setting the planet on fire.

Insure Our Survival spokesperson Steve Tooze said: “The insurance industry has the power to stop the fossil fuel industry in its tracks by withdrawing the insurance that protects them from huge financial losses when things go wrong in a high-risk industry.

“Currently, insurers are refusing to use that power. Instead, they are choosing to bet on profits from underwriting oil, gas and coal projects that are accelerating the climate crisis to levels that could destroy our civilisation in our lifetimes.

“In effect, Insurers are insuring the worst people in the world to dig up more fossil fuels that cause extreme weather and flood our homes. Then they are charging us more and more to insure our homes against the increasing risk of flooding. 

“The campaign’s actions from October 28 onwards will be designed to show what the insurance industry’s heartless strategy means to billions of people, including people in the UK: flooding, food shortages and social unrest and collapse.

“But it doesn’t have to be this way. Insurance executives can be the heroes who stop the fossil fuel companies destroying our future by withdrawing their support from this high-risk, civilisation-wrecking sector that will otherwise destroy everything we love.”

The full ultimatum letter sent to insurance executives reads:

Reluctantly and with regret, we write to inform you that your business has been targeted for further disruptive protest action by Extinction Rebellion (XR).

You have 14 days from today to make a public declaration that you will stop insuring all new fossil fuel projects. 

Your failure to make such a declaration by October 28 will mean that your business in the UK will become the focus of a wide range of nonviolent direct actions by thousands of XR activists and their allies during a week of actions in London and across the UK, and in the weeks and months after that.

In February, XR, acting alongside a global campaign coalition called Insure Our Future, staged a week-long series of actions across the world, including repeated mass visits to the offices of insurers in the City of London and in towns and cities across the UK.

Some of your colleagues in the insurance industry took our week of actions as a wake-up call and immediately announced plans to distance themselves from the fossil fuel industries that are doubling-down on setting the planet on fire. Most notably, Zurich Insurance made an immediate announcement that they would no longer insure new oil and gas projects.

Your business, unfortunately, chose not to respond to our demands. 

Instead, you continue to offer insurance to the operations and infrastructure of oil, gas and coal criminals drilling and digging for products that an overwhelming scientific consensus agrees will end our civilisation in our lifetimes, displacing and killing billions in the process.

This is not a point of view or opinion from Extinction Rebellion. It is rather the stark warning from the Potsdam Institute, one of the most respected climate research institutions in the world, issued in a report in October 2024 (1).

The report opens by saying: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperilled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis…. we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage.

“We will see much more extreme weather in the coming years. Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions.

“These projections paint a bleak picture of the future, with many scientists envisioning widespread famines, conflicts, mass migration, and increasing extreme weather that will surpass anything witnessed thus far, posing catastrophic consequences for both humanity and the biosphere.” 

We understand that risk modelling by experienced and senior members of your business has made you only too aware of the dire situation faced by the human race as a result of the terrifying climate realities as recently reviewed by the Potsdam Institute. But you have decided to continue insuring fossil fuel companies who are creating this situation in order to maximise your profits in the short term.

We therefore hold you and your business personally and collectively responsible for the catastrophic impacts of the climate emergency including declining crop yields and the rising threat of global and UK food shortages and famine.

Consequently, you’ve left us with no choice but to place you on a target list for Insure Our Survival, an ongoing and rapidly expanding Extinction Rebellion national and global campaign of protests, disruptions, and actions aimed at insurers, reinsurers and underwriters, that launched in July 2024.

We will again be using a variety of nonviolent tactics to do everything possible to damage your reputation with the public, your peers and with corporate clients, and thereby to negatively impact your revenue streams, recruitment capability and share price.

With increasing numbers of deadly heat waves and floods driven by the climate crisis happening for the UK and other countries this year, our actions will be designed to very publicly link the name of your business to each new incidence of death and destruction caused by your fossil fuel clients. Our aim will be to permanently toxify your brand in the minds of public and business communities.

To be clear, we do NOT want to do this. We believe that the experience, talent and skill of the global insurance industry has a key role to play in facilitating a speedy and urgent transition by 2030 to renewable energy.  

Currently, however, your experience, talent and skill is being used to facilitate the expansion of a fossil fuel industry that puts obscene profits above the survival of current and future generations. You are choosing to Insure Collapse.

You may decide upon receipt of this letter that you would like your business to be removed from our target list.

We would be happy to do so should you agree to our single demand: publicly announce an immediate, complete and permanent withdrawal from underwriting all new oil, gas and coal projects.

We genuinely hope that you will make an announcement with the utmost speed in order to avoid your offices being targeted for protest and direct action.  In addition, we look forward to hearing about your strategy for a speedy exit from the entire fossil fuel market.

With regards

Insure Our Survival
InsureOurSurvival@extinctionrebellion.uk
14 October 2024

Sources
[1] The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, October 2024: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biae087/7808595

About Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

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Time has almost entirely run out to address the climate and ecological crisis which is upon us, including the sixth mass species extinction, global pollution, and increasingly rapid climate change. If urgent and radical action isn’t taken, we’re heading towards 4˚C warming, leading to societal collapse and mass loss of life. The younger generation, racially marginalised communities and the Global South are on the frontline. No-one will escape the devastating impacts.