[Date]
The Honorable Don Beyer
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Beyer,
You and Sen. Van Hollen have carried cap-and-dividend legislation, the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act, since 2018, and you serve on Ways and Means. In May 2025 you joined fellow SEEC members on that committee in criticizing the Republican rollback of clean-energy tax policy. I am writing because ELBA needs a champion on exactly that committee.
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.
Your bill and mine share a conviction: make polluters pay and return the money to the public as a dividend. ELBA adds a charge that rises each year, a ceiling on tonnes that can only tighten, and the profits tax. It is blunter than yours, and I would like your drafting eye on it. The text still lists Internal Revenue Code sections to verify and has no JCT score, and that is work Ways and Means is best placed to do.
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. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
Three requests. Review Title I with the committee's staff and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Join as an original cosponsor if you can. And press for a hearing, with the reconciliation path on the agenda.
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