[Date]
The Honorable Ro Khanna
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Khanna,
In March you and Senator Whitehouse reintroduced the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, H.R. 7960, calling the Iran war an economic blunder that was sending gas prices soaring for working Americans. You also helped lead the End Polluter Welfare Act, and in 2021, as chair of the Oversight environment subcommittee, you had oil industry executives testify under oath about climate disinformation. I am writing to ask you to be the lead House sponsor of a bill that takes the next step.
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.
H.R. 7960 claws back a windfall when prices spike and returns it per person. ELBA is a different and deeper bill, not an add-on to yours. It aims at the profit motive for extracting at all, and it keeps your idea of putting money back in people's hands through an equal climate dividend. Section 104 carries your subsidy-repeal work forward, ending drilling-cost expensing, percentage depletion and oil-recovery credits for the covered companies. I know this asks far more than the 27 House cosponsors of H.R. 7960 were asked to accept.
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.
Would you introduce ELBA as its lead House sponsor in January, with Senator Whitehouse as the Senate companion? I would also value your help finding a champion on Ways and Means, where it will be referred.
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