Background:

The City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee is considering a motion Monday afternoon to avoid purchasing insurance from companies that fail to acknowledge the risk to the climate in insuring and investing in fossil fuel companies that continue to focus on coal mining and tar sand drilling instead of moving toward renewables.

The motion would
1. instruct the city to report within 30 days

• A list of insurance policies held by the city of Los Angeles,

• A scoring system to rate insurers based on the extent to which they invest in and underwrite companies engaged in fossil fuel operations that pose the greatest harm to the environment, specifically coal mining and tar sand drilling

2. instruct the city to report in 90 days with options for how to take the ratings into account when choosing companies from which to purchase or renew insurance.

Full motion text: https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2020/20-0492_mot_04-22-2020.pdf

Agenda: https://cityclerk.lacity.org/councilagenda/MeetingView.aspx?MeetingID=9344

 HOW TO CALL:

Meeting time: Monday, Feb 22nd, 2pm

Call the phone number (669) 254-5252, then enter the meeting number 160 655 3266 followed by #. Press # again when it asks for the participant ID.
Once you are in the meeting, you need to request to speak by pressing *9 on your keypad.

What to Say:

You’ll be speaking on agenda item 20.

My name is _______,

Say why climate change matters to you and why we need to fix it. Be personal, how does it impact you and your community?

The city must cut ties from insurance companies that help fossil fuel companies pollute our communities.

I urge the council to pass agenda item 20.

Additional talking points:

According to the CAO’s 2018 RFP for property and liability insurance, Los Angeles spends approximately $2 million per year on these policies, largely from companies which were identified by the California Insurance Commissioner’s Climate Risk Carbon Initiative database as having billions of dollars of investments in coal and other fossil fuels.

These insurance policies are a significant point of leverage to move the insurance companies away from helping oil and gas companies and stop climate change.