[Date]
The Honorable Yassamin Ansari
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Ansari,
As ranking member of the Natural Resources subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, you have argued against more drilling and mining on public lands. This year you joined both the End Polluter Welfare Act and H.R. 7960, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. Your extreme heat bills, on urban heat islands and the economic cost of heat, show what that means in Phoenix. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of the Extinguishing the Social License to Burn Fossils Act, ELBA, to be introduced in January.
I am a private citizen in Utah, not a lobbyist. I ran for Congress in 2020, and I wrote this bill.
The numbers have only hardened since I first wrote to Congress in 2020. Human-caused warming reached 1.37°C in 2025 and is rising about 0.27°C per decade. About 130 billion tonnes of CO2 remain for an even chance of holding 1.5°C, roughly three years of today's emissions.
ELBA changes the rules rather than villainizing anyone. It taxes the excess profits of large fossil companies from 25% up to a 75% cap, and taxes new extraction capacity at 75% of all its profit. A company still extracting after its fuel's statutory end date (coal 2035, oil and gas 2040) pays 75% on all its income. A carbon charge starting at $40 a ton, matched by a charge on imports, returns 60% of the money as an equal per-person climate dividend paid quarterly. Export licenses fall to zero by 2040, and no new fossil capacity is built. Workers get wage, health and pension guarantees, and communities and Tribes get transition funds and LIHEAP. Title I (revenue, dividend, guarantees) is written to move in reconciliation; Title II (ceiling, new capacity, exports) is regulatory.
Three parts reach your work. Section 203 ends new federal leasing and offers to buy back nonproducing leases, with payments from the Judgment Fund. Section 104 repeals fossil tax preferences for the large companies the bill covers. And the $10 billion a year LIHEAP floor matters in a place where summer heat is a danger to health.
I have a daughter who will spend her life in the world we are making. My office sat between an oil refinery and a medical waste incinerator, and I drove to it because there was no other way to get there. Until 2014 I believed what Exxon sold me about carbon dioxide and climate models, though Eunice Foote showed in 1856 that CO2 traps heat. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
Will you be an original cosponsor? And would you champion Section 203 in Natural Resources, including a hearing on leasing and the buy-back?
I will gladly testify, or simply talk. Take the bill, amend it as you see fit; please.
In solidarity,
Russ Fugal
https://climate.fugl.dev
https://medium.com/@rfugal