[Date]
The Honorable Summer Lee
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Lee,
Congratulations on winning a third term. You are one of the few Pennsylvania Democrats to oppose fracking, and you led a bill to address abandoned oil and gas wells that the House approved in 2024. You were an original cosponsor of H.R. 1135 (Polluters Pay), and you joined Rep. Khanna's Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, H.R. 7960, in September. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of a bill that goes one step further.
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) will 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.
Pennsylvania is gas country, and a transition that fails its workers will fail. So the bill puts plugging orphaned wells and reclaiming mines on a labor-standards footing, guarantees wages, health care and pensions for workers who lose fossil jobs, and replaces lost severance, royalty and property-tax revenue for counties and school districts that depend on the industry. It also reserves at least 40 percent of the benefits for disadvantaged communities, and requires real-time, public fence-line monitoring at refineries, petrochemical plants and export terminals. I know those are the neighborhoods you represent, from Clairton to Braddock.
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. 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.
I have two requests. Please be an original cosponsor when the bill is introduced. And because you know what plugging wells and talking to gas workers takes, please tell me where the transition language falls short, and consider hosting a Pennsylvania roundtable with workers and county leaders so that I can listen.
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