[Date]
The Honorable Nanette Diaz Barragán
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Barragán,
You have worked on the End Polluter Welfare Act since 2020, you co-led the 2025 version, H.R. 4714, and you announced a bill for a 2,500-foot public health buffer around oil and gas production during a harbor tour with EPA's administrator. Your district includes Wilmington. That is why I am writing.
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.
The bill is the Extinguishing the Social License to Burn Fossils Act, ELBA, to be introduced in January. 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 speak to your record. Section 104 repeals the drilling and depletion breaks and the enhanced-oil-recovery credit for covered companies, the same family of subsidies your bill targets. Section 206 requires refineries, petrochemical plants and export terminals to monitor their fence lines in real time, with public results and citizen-suit enforcement, and requires every refinery to publish a retirement and remediation plan with notice to workers and the community. And at least 40 percent of transition benefits go to disadvantaged communities.
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, so I know a little about living beside both. 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.
Would you be an original House cosponsor in January? And as a member of Energy and Commerce, would you help shape Sections 206 and 207, the fenceline, refinery-retirement and household-energy provisions, so that people who live beside refineries write the rules that protect them?
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