[Date]
The Honorable Becca Balint
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Balint,
You are an original cosponsor of the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act and a cosponsor of H.R. 7960, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. In July you listened in Barre as Vermonters described the 2023 and 2024 floods and how long FEMA help took to reach them. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of the next step, 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.
H.R. 1135 asks who pays for the damage already done. ELBA is built to stop adding to it. For a cold-winter state, the $10 billion a year LIHEAP floor and an equal dividend, with a full share for every child, mean the transition does not land on households least able to carry it.
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. I don't blame ordinary people who were duped, myself included. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
Will you be an original cosponsor? And as a member of the Budget Committee, would you tell me how Title I should be framed so it can be considered in reconciliation?
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