[Date]
Representative-elect Adam Hamawy
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative-elect Hamawy,
Congratulations on your win in New Jersey's 12th. You are an Army combat surgeon who ran on passing the Green New Deal, and a doctor is the person I most want to read this bill. Its fenceline-health provisions were written for patients like the ones you will meet in your district.
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.
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 fit your background. Refineries, petrochemical plants and export terminals would have to monitor benzene, ethylene oxide, soot and other pollutants at the fence line, publish the results in real time and in local languages, and fix any exceedance within 45 days, enforceable by citizen suit. Displaced fossil workers would have their health premiums paid in full. And the equal dividend, with no income cutoff and a full share for every child, puts money in the pockets of the families who pay first when heat and storms hit. New Jersey has had 14 climate disasters since 2011, and every county has been hit at least five times, according to Rebuild by Design.
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. I don't blame ordinary people who were duped, myself included. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
My ask: would you be an original cosponsor when the bill is introduced in January? I would also welcome your review of the fenceline-health section as a physician. I know ELBA goes well beyond any bill now in the House, and I would rather hear your objections now than 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