[Date]
The Honorable Valerie Foushee
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Foushee,
Congratulations on your re-election. You have cosponsored the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act and the End Polluter Welfare Act, joined the 2023 reintroduction of the Green New Deal resolution, and, with Rep. Manning, led a letter urging FERC to deny the MVP Southgate pipeline extension. Those fights are 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.
Two parts speak to you directly. ELBA bars new pipeline capacity for fossil fuels and bars the federal permits and Natural Gas Act certificates for it, with narrow exceptions for replacement and electric reliability. And the carbon charge counts methane using facility-level measurement, including aerial and satellite verification, which is the kind of measurement science your Science Committee knows well.
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.
Two requests. Please consider being an original cosponsor in January. And would you review Sections 102 and 209, on methane and carbon accounting, with Science Committee eyes? I would rather have them tested early than found weak later.
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