[Date]
Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator-elect El-Sayed,
Congratulations. When you were Detroit's health director, you pushed back on Marathon's request to raise sulfur dioxide emissions at its refinery in 48217, Michigan's most polluted ZIP code. In a primary debate you said that reaching 100% renewable energy means taking on fossil fuel corporations and their political spending, and you named the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act among the bills you would champion. A bill I wrote is built on the same conviction.
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) goes into the House 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 Detroit. Refineries would have to monitor their fence lines in real time, publish the results, and answer to citizen suits, and every refinery owner must publish a retirement and remediation plan. No new refining capacity may be built. And at least 40 percent of the transition benefits must reach disadvantaged communities. The dividend also echoes your emphasis on getting money out of politics and into people's pockets.
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. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
My ask: be among the first senators to sign the Senate companion, and if Senator Whitehouse or another senior senator takes the lead, co-lead it. A new senator who knows what a fence line means could shape Title II's refinery provisions.
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