[Date]
Representative-elect Melat Kiros
Member-elect, 120th Congress (CO-1)
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative-elect Kiros,
Congratulations. E&E News reported this summer that you call the Green New Deal a floor now, not a ceiling. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of a bill that tries to build the next floor: ending fossil extraction in the United States on a statutory schedule.
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.
Denver knows what a refinery next door costs. Globeville and Elyria-Swansea, which Colorado classifies as disproportionately impacted by air pollution, sit beside the Suncor refinery in Commerce City, the state's only one. ELBA would require every refinery, petrochemical plant and export terminal to monitor its fence line in real time, publish the results, and answer to citizen suits. Each refinery owner would have to publish a retirement and remediation plan with a date, notice to workers, and site cleanup. No refinery could be expanded. And the dividend would reach every Denver household in equal shares, whatever its income.
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, so I have some feeling for those neighborhoods. 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 is to sign on as an original cosponsor when ELBA is introduced in January. It is more aggressive than anything yet filed, including Rep. Khanna's windfall tax, so it needs members who will say that a floor must keep rising.
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