NEW YORK—Manning Rollerson stood at the glass doors of Chubb Insurance’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, a petition in hand and a Houston Texans cap shading his face. Chants echoed off the surrounding buildings, but no company representatives came out—only building security. Rollerson’s request was clear: He wanted Chubb to stop insuring fossil fuel projects near his home.
For three years, Rollerson, a 63-year-old Black veteran from Freeport, Texas, has journeyed to the headquarters of insurers and financiers bankrolling the fossil fuel industry, demanding divestment from the industries he says poison his community.
Rollerson, founder of the environmental advocacy group Freeport Haven Project, joined more than 70 Gulf South residents who traveled to New York City recently for a week of demonstrations targeting corporations involved in financing, insuring or profiting from oil and gas infrastructure expansion along the Texas coast and in Southern Louisiana.
The protests picked up where last year’s “Summer of Heat” protests on Wall Street left off. But this year, the Trump administration has sharply steered U.S. energy policy away from renewables and toward fossil fuels—particularly liquified natural gas (LNG) exports from the Gulf Coast—making the moment all the more meaningful for the protesters from Texas and Louisiana.
While many of the activists cite Trump’s rollback of billions of dollars in Biden-era environmental justice grants as a catalyst, they stress that this fight predates Trump’s fossil fuel politics and is rooted in decades of organizing against pollution, public health crises and environmental racism in the Gulf South.
Roishetta Ozane, protesting alongside Rollerson, is from Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana, founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana and co-director of the Gulf South Fossil Finance Hub. She said both of her children suffer from asthma their doctor attributes to nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate pollution choking their community. Soon, they may live just a few miles from the second-largest LNG export terminal in the United States.
She and others had fought to stop that planned complex, the Calcasieu Pass 2, known as CP2. During their week of protests from July 28 through Aug. 3, they learned it was moving forward with historic investment levels.
In the Gulf South, “cancer is not a coincidence, and asthma is not just bad luck,” said Ozane’s 12-year-old daughter, Kamea. “They are the result of environmental racism, plain and simple.”
Natural gas has been pitched as better for the climate than coal. But because it’s primarily methane, leaks of that potent greenhouse gas from production fields to end use pack a wallop. The climate emissions from that full lifecycle connected to CP2 would be comparable to 51 coal-fired power plants, according to the Sierra Club. The project’s owner, Venture Global, did not respond to a request for comment.
“Our communities are in desperate need of a transition, because the alternative is death,” said Ozane.
Protesters also linked their struggles against environmental racism with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, citing shared financiers of weapons and fossil fuels, and parallel histories as “sacrifice zones” for Western development.
The Gulf South activists were joined by New York-based activists and grassroots organizations who helped coordinate the protests.
Despite a well-documented history of high pollution exposure along the Gulf Coast and an 85-mile stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as “Cancer Alley,” Ozane, Rollerson and the other Gulf South activists received almost no media coverage of their protest.
“Toxic Billionaires Tour”
The first big demonstration, organized by a coalition of Gulf Coast environmental justice groups and called the “Toxic Billionaires Tour,” kicked off on a sweltering July 30.
Around two hundred activists gathered at the southeast corner of Central Park before marching through Midtown Manhattan’s busy streets, pausing outside the offices of insurance giants Chubb and American International Group (AIG), the financial giant BlackRock and two large Japanese banking companies, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) and Mizuho.
Chubb, AIG, MUFG and Mizuho either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
“When they come to our neighborhood, we go to theirs,” Rollerson said to the crowd outside Chubb’s headquarters. “They come to our communities promising to be good neighbors, but instead they pollute in our communities, they dump in our communities and even blow up in our communities.”
Rollerson speaks from experience. His childhood home in the East End of Freeport, Texas—a neighborhood where Black residents were relocated during segregation in 1930—was surrounded by industrial infrastructure: an LNG terminal to the north, offshore oil rigs to the east, refineries to the south and a Dow Chemical plant to the west.
Rollerson now lives in downtown Freeport. The land his childhood home once sat on, which his family still owned, was taken by eminent domain to make way for the expansion of Port Freeport, which is growing to keep pace with regional fossil fuel exports.
“They come to our communities promising to be good neighbors, but instead they pollute in our communities, they dump in our communities and even blow up in our communities.”
— Manning Rollerson, Texas resident
In Freeport, the fossil fuel and petrochemical companies arrive promising economic benefits and minimal pollution, Rollerson said, but Freeport has a poverty rate of 14.6 percent—above the national average. Instead of economic stability, residents face what he describes as toxic skies and contaminated waterways.
Most activists who gathered for the week of action shared similar stories from their communities, describing broken promises and comparable impacts from the fossil fuel industry.
They said the companies targeted during the “Toxic Billionaires Tour” play a direct role in projects polluting air and water along the Gulf Coast. Chubb and AIG both insure Freeport LNG, a gas export facility just north of Rollerson’s home that experienced an explosion in 2022.
Rollerson and the coalition believe previous protests of Chubb have had an impact. Earlier this year, the company stopped covering another Gulf Coast project, Calcasieu Pass, though the complex owner said that was its decision rather than Chubb’s. Chubb also stopped providing liability insurance to Rio Grande LNG in Texas, advocates announced last year.
Rollerson handed his petition urging Chubb to stop insuring fossil-fuel projects in the region to the building’s head of security. Then the march continued to MUFG and Mizuho, two Japanese banks that continue to finance Rio Grande LNG.
Organizers said the Japanese lending underscores the persistent challenge in fossil fuel finance: As some institutions retreat from projects fueling destructive climate change, others continue to provide crucial funding that keeps the industry growing.
“These financial institutions hold the power to shape a sustainable future by redirecting their investments away from environmental racism and toward renewable energy and community-led initiatives,” said Ozane, the Calcasieu Parish activist.
By the time the march reached BlackRock’s tower in Hudson Yards, the heat index had climbed to 95 degrees, a sweltering representation of increasingly extreme weather amid worsening climate change. Organizers handed out popsicles and accordion fans printed with “Gulf South Rising” along the ridges as Ozane stepped forward to address the crowd. She spoke not only of pipelines and refineries back home but also of what she called the genocide in Gaza—in which, she said, BlackRock plays a central role.
“While we are dying from pollution at home, we are also caught in a war abroad—a war we never asked for,” said Ozane, referencing the U.S. role in the Israeli occupation of Gaza. “This is a pattern that repeats itself, with companies like BlackRock financing and sustaining this legacy.”
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BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, invests billions in fossil fuel infrastructure and holds shares in weapons and surveillance technology manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman—key suppliers to Israel’s military. In 2024, United Nations human rights experts called on BlackRock and other companies to stop supporting “arms transfers” to Israel.
While BlackRock declined to comment on the protests, a representative said that “the choice of where to invest ultimately rests with our clients. We are bound to adhere to their investment guidelines and objectives and do not dictate particular investment strategies.”
The representative also pointed to BlackRock’s “wide range of sustainable and transition investment strategies for clients.”
Civil Disobedience
By Aug. 1, the heatwave in New York had finally broken. The air felt sharp and cool—“January weather,” the Gulf South advocates called it.
“I think it is ironic that it is so chilly here today after being scorching hot all week and after a flood yesterday,” Ozane said, outside Citigroup headquarters on Greenwich Street in Tribeca. “These are signs of the times we are living in. The climate crisis is here, and Citigroup is funding it.”
Citigroup has long drawn scrutiny from climate activists for its fossil fuel investments. In 2024, it ranked as the third-largest investor in fossil fuels, and since the Paris Agreement, the bank has invested over $396 billion in the industry, according to the Banking on Climate Chaos report published in January by the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network and six other environmental organizations.
For Gulf South activists, Citigroup’s investments in fossil fuels were familiar. According to research by advocacy groups including Stand.earth, Ozane’s Vessel Project and the Texas Campaign for the Environment, the bank has funneled $1.6 billion into Gulf South LNG projects.
Citigroup declined requests for comment but has criticized research by these activists, calling it “misleading.” In 2024, a spokesperson for Citi told the publication Banking Dive that the activists’ research methodology was “wildly out of sync” with the bank’s true fossil fuel finances.
After picketing outside Citigroup’s headquarters for an hour, the crowd of around one hundred marched to Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser’s West Village residence.
There, outside the gated building, activists linked arms, some with PVC pipes and metal chains, blocking the entrance to the community.
“Jane Fraser and all CEOs funding fossil fuels need to start thinking about us instead of their bottom line,” Rollerson said, his voice hoarse from a week of protest.
Among those who locked arms was Rollerson’s wife, Ruth. As police moved in to arrest her and other activists for using unauthorized sound devices and blocking traffic, Rollerson proudly watched. “She’s fighting for the women in our community dying from cancer, asthma and COPD,” he said, referring to diseases that had claimed the lives of his mother, aunt and cousin.
While police loaded 29 arrested activists into vans, the remaining protesters responded with an act of cultural defiance: They began line dancing in the street, what organizers described as both a celebration of their Southern roots and continued resistance.
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Ryan Krugman is a recent graduate of St. Lawrence University where he majored in Environmental Studies and Sociology. He is currently a masters student at the Columbia Climate School focusing on climate change reporting and communications. Ryan plans to report on climate activism, adaptation and energy policy as an ICN fellow.
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