and advocacy group Insure Our Future shows that insurance companies' newfound awareness of the climate emergency hasn't stopped them from continuing to underwrite the top source of the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating the planet, causing sea levels to rise, and fueling extreme weather events.
Last year, the top five insurers listed above issued coverage for the production of more than 245 million tons of coal, representing at least 41% of the coal produced. Liberty Mutual underwrote Signal Peak Energy's Bull Mountain Mine No. 1 in 2022; while the company's policy does not define "exposure," the project likely violates the insurer's stated threshold because 90% of Signal Peak's revenue is derived from coal.
Zurich's coal policy contains a loophole, said Public Citizen, that has allowed the company to insure thermal coal mines even though in 2019 it said it would "no longer underwrite or invest in companies that generate more than 30% of their revenue from mining thermal coal or produce more than 20 million tons of thermal coal per year."From 2020 until November 2022, Zurich insured two subsidiaries of Alpha Metallurgical Resources—Alpha Coal West and the third-largest U.S.