[Date]
The Honorable Betty McCollum
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative McCollum,
You are a cosponsor of the End Polluter Welfare Act and of Rep. Khanna's Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, H.R. 7960. In 2021 you also joined colleagues in asking President Biden to review the Line 3 pipeline permit, in part because climate impacts, spill risk and treaty rights had not been weighed. Congratulations on your re-election. I am writing because that record is the foundation for a larger bill.
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, 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.
Two parts reflect your work. At least 15 percent of the community transition money goes directly to Tribes, off the top, and is never passed through a state. No new pipeline capacity could be built, and no federal authorization issued for it. And because you sit on Appropriations, you will understand the clause requiring that the new funds supplement, not supplant, LIHEAP, weatherization, abandoned-mine cleanup and Tribal programs.
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. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
Two requests. Please consider being an original cosponsor in January. And when ELBA's funds reach the appropriations table, will you help hold the line that they add to, rather than replace, existing programs?
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