[Date]
The Honorable Edward J. Markey
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Markey,
In December 2025 you introduced the Lowering American Energy Costs Act, S. 3545, to lower household energy bills by stopping exports of natural gas. You are an original cosponsor of the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act and of Senator Whitehouse's Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. In July 2026 you reintroduced Green New Deal bills for health and for schools. I am writing because a bill I wrote belongs beside them, and I hope you will be an original cosponsor of its Senate companion.
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) goes into the House 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.
Your export bill and ELBA share a premise: exports should not grow while the ceiling on extraction falls. Where S. 3545 stops gas exports, ELBA licenses them without fee under a quota that reaches zero for coal in 2035, LNG in 2037, and oil and pipeline gas by 2040, so I would welcome your amendments to speed it. Senator Whitehouse's bill taxes the price spike; ELBA taxes the profit motive itself and returns the money to every person.
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. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
I have two asks. Be an original cosponsor of the Senate companion. And, as a member of Environment and Public Works, help us win hearings on Title II's ceiling, new-capacity ban and export quota, while Title I takes the reconciliation 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