[Date]
The Honorable Pramila Jayapal
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Jayapal,
This August you and Senator Whitehouse led 90 colleagues in a brief supporting the ability of states and localities to hold oil and gas companies accountable for climate harms. That fight is part of why I wrote my bill. You are also on all three of the closest bills, H.R. 7960, the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act and the End Polluter Welfare Act, and you and Rep. Tlaib once led a letter urging the President to phase out oil and gas production on federal lands. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor.
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, or 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 echo your record. The bill's findings say that courts have held state climate-damage laws may be preempted, so national action is required, which is the problem your brief addressed. And Section 203 ends new federal oil, gas and coal leasing and offers to buy back unused leases, the step your federal-lands letter asked for.
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.
Will you be an original cosponsor in January and help me reach colleagues through the Progressive Caucus? Your seat on the Budget Committee also matters, because Title I is written to move in reconciliation, and I would welcome your judgment on that path.
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