Uninsuring Trans Mountain
Since 2019, we’ve been pressuring Trans Mountain’s known insurers to drop the pipeline and stop insuring all tar sands. And it’s working. Eighteen companies and counting have since cut ties with the pipeline. Soon the pipeline will be uninsurable – and without insurance, construction will be stopped in its tracks.
The insurance industry is becoming increasingly aware that climate change is an existential threat to its entire business model. From hurricanes to wildfires, insurance payouts for damage caused by climate-related severe weather events have increased exponentially in the past decade – and are only growing, year after year.
In response, some of the world’s biggest insurance companies have chosen to stop insuring the worst polluting fossil fuels – first coal, and now the high-carbon Alberta tar sands, which have been described as a “climate bomb.” So by uninsuring Trans Mountain, we’re also making it harder for all future tar sands projects to find insurance.
The Trans Mountain pipeline, if built, would ship more than 890,000 barrels per year of highly polluting tar sands crude to the B.C. coast, increasing Canada’s climate emissions and making it impossible to meet our Paris commitments. So when Trans Mountain’s insurance came up for renewal in August 2019, we reached out to the companies insuring the project to make sure they understood its full climate impacts.
We did it again in 2020, 2021 and 2022 with a letter, like this one, to the CEO’s of the insurance companies that were backing the Trans Mountain pipeline as of August 2020. We wanted to know if they’d commit to stop insuring tar sands projects, beginning with uninsuring Trans Mountain.
In April 2021, the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) approved Trans Mountain’s request to keep its insurers’ identities hidden going forward. Although we do not have the most recent certificate of insurance, we are continuing to target the insurers that were previously linked to the project – and will do so until they publicly announce they will cut ties with Trans Mountain.
Find out more by exploring the table below. Note that on desktop you can sort each column alphabetically by clicking on the column title.
