[Date]
Representative-elect Brad Lander
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative-elect Lander,
Congratulations on your win in Brooklyn. As New York City comptroller you helped move the city's pension funds out of publicly traded fossil fuel reserve owners, and three of the five funds adopted net-zero-by-2040 plans on your watch. You have described divestment as a fiduciary responsibility and not only an environmental one. That framing is why I am writing, because the same word explains the problem ELBA tries to fix.
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.
A pension fund's trustees must weigh the long-term value of what they hold. The managers of a fossil company owe duties that, today, reward expanding extraction and delaying the transition. The bill's findings say so, and its tax schedule, new-capacity tax and statutory end dates are meant to realign those incentives with the public interest. It also guarantees pensions: the United Mine Workers 1974 plan would be paid in full, and the pensions of workers whose fossil employers fail would be guaranteed. You understand better than most that retirement security and the climate can be protected together.
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.
My ask: would you be an original cosponsor when the bill is introduced in January? I would also be grateful if you would review the pension, successor-liability and financial-assurance sections. The bill is more aggressive than anything now in the House, and your fiduciary expertise would make it stronger.
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