[Date]
The Honorable Greg Casar
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Casar,
Congratulations on winning the redrawn 37th District. You are a cosponsor of Rep. Khanna's Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, H.R. 7960, and an original cosponsor of the End Polluter Welfare Act, and you have been chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That makes you one of the Texas voices on both bills. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of a bill that goes one step further.
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 Extinguishing the Social License to Burn Fossils Act (ELBA) will 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.
Two features may matter most from Texas. A worker in oil and gas field services is covered by the guarantees: 100 percent of wages for three years, then 70 percent for two, with health premiums and pensions. And the dividend is an equal share for every person, with no income phase-down, so most low- and moderate-income households get back more than the carbon charge costs them. The bill's findings name the Permian and other basins among the places that have carried the pollution, and fenceline monitoring would make that burden visible.
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. 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.
I have two requests. Please be an original cosponsor when the bill is introduced. And if you lead the Progressive Caucus again, I ask that it hear ELBA, tell me where it is too weak or too hard, and consider it for the caucus's priorities in 2027.
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