Rainforest Action Network responds to DFC’s announcement of Chubb as lead partner for the $20 billion Maritime Reinsurance Plan
The Trump administration is using $20 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to backstop oil and gas tankers navigating a war zone and Chubb, the world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer, is cashing in. When private markets dropped coverage and raised premiums on Strait of Hormuz passage, the Trump administration manufactured a federal backstop and handed the keys to Chubb, who already rakes in an estimated $750 million annually in direct written premiums from the fossil fuel industry.
The sector Chubb is being paid to stabilize is anything but stable. Overnight, missile attacks on the world’s largest LNG facility in Qatar, which accounts for nearly 20% of global supply, caused prices to immediately skyrocket, triggering demand destruction and fuel switching across global markets. Chubb is not stabilizing a reliable energy sector. It is underwriting one that the world’s leading energy analysts say is in a structural crisis.
That crisis has real costs for families in the US. Consumers paid an extra $111 billion in wholesale natural gas prices in just sixteen months during Russia’s war on Ukraine and that price increase is expected to repeat with this conflict. US methane/LNG exporters, meanwhile, stand to capture windfall profits of up to $20 billion monthly if disruptions persist through summer. Yet those crisis-driven gains don’t change the sector’s deep structural risks, according to a report released by Rainforest Action Network this week.
These cost increases compound what American families already pay. Chubb is a major insurer of US Gulf Coast methane/LNG terminals that are driving up domestic energy prices by as much as 54% through 2030. And the fossil fuel pollution it underwrites accelerates the climate disasters that make home insurance unaffordable for millions of American families, with premiums rising more than 30% between 2020 and 2023 as a direct result. Chubb has invested billions in fossil fuel companies since 2019 and collected only $216 million in renewable energy premiums compared to $750 million from fossil fuels in 2024 alone.
This is a choice. Chubb could instead accelerate the transition to renewable energy which is safer, more stable, and more insurable than fossil fuels exposed to geopolitical conflict and climate risk. Instead, it is backing an industry whose volatility drives up energy prices and whose pollution makes insurance unaffordable for the very customers it is supposed to serve. There are much better uses for US taxpayer dollars than a $20 billion bet on a war zone.