[Date]
Senator-elect Troy Jackson
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator-elect Jackson,
Congratulations. In your four debates with Senator Collins, you raised the price of heating oil, and about half of Maine households heat with it, more than in any other state. You have also said you want to revive Maine's stalled offshore wind effort. As a fifth-generation logger, you know what a day's work and a winter's fuel bill cost. A bill I wrote tries to take both seriously.
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.
I will be plain about the price of heating oil. The carbon charge reaches fuel prices by design. The bill answers with a dividend of an equal share for every person, children included, with no income phase-down, and a $10 billion-a-year LIHEAP floor. Weatherization money pays for heat pumps for low-income households. The bill's finding is that most low- and moderate-income households come out ahead, but no official score exists yet. Workers displaced from fossil jobs get 100 percent of their wages for three years, health premiums, and protected pensions.
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 an original cosponsor of the Senate companion, and help me test the household math against Maine's real winter bills before the bill is final.
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