[Date]
The Honorable Jared Huffman
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Huffman,
You have led the Keep It in the Ground Act with Senator Merkley, a bill to get the Federal Government out of the fossil fuel business, and in May you cosponsored Rep. Khanna's Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, H.R. 7960. As the senior Democrat on Natural Resources, you know better than anyone what Federal leases lock in. That is 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.
Your committee's jurisdiction is where Title II lives. Section 203 stops Federal lease sales and new leases for oil, gas and coal, bars new mines, and offers to cancel nonproducing leases for what holders paid, from the Judgment Fund and not from the transition money. Section 108 sends 15 percent of transition money to Tribes off the top and funds the plugging of orphaned wells and the reclaiming of abandoned mines.
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.
Would you be an original House cosponsor in January? And would you press for a Natural Resources hearing on Section 203, so the Keep It in the Ground idea gets tested against a bill with the guarantees attached?
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