[Date]
Representative-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier
Member-elect, 120th Congress (NY-13)
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative-elect Avila Chevalier,
Congratulations. In your June debate you pushed a Green New Deal for public housing. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of a bill that makes fossil profits pay for the transition.
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 bear on your neighbors. Weatherization money can install heat pumps and efficient appliances in low-income homes, and for renters only where the landlord agrees not to raise rent or evict without cause for five years. Utilities would have to offer households under 200 percent of the poverty line a rate that caps home energy costs at 6 percent of income, and could not shut off service during extreme-heat warnings. And projects funded under the bill pay prevailing wages, use project labor agreements above $10 million, and give hiring priority to displaced fossil workers and residents of disadvantaged communities. WE ACT for Environmental Justice notes that peaker plants, which run hardest on the hottest days, sit within a few miles of Harlem and Washington Heights.
I have a daughter who will spend her life in the world we are making. Until 2014 I believed what Exxon sold me about carbon dioxide and climate models, though Eunice Foote showed in 1856 that CO2 traps heat. I don't blame ordinary people who were duped, myself included. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
My ask is to sign on as an original cosponsor when ELBA is introduced in January. It will draw fire as more aggressive than anything yet filed, including Rep. Khanna's windfall tax. A founding cosponsor who made a Green New Deal for public housing part of her case would help it survive that.
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