[Date]
The Honorable James P. McGovern
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative McGovern,
You are an original cosponsor of the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act, and in June you joined H.R. 7960, the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act. Both bills say the companies that profit from fossil fuels should pay. As a senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, you also know that a good bill still needs a path to the floor. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of the Extinguishing the Social License to Burn Fossils Act, ELBA, to be introduced in January, and to tell me how that path should be built.
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.
The bill is built in two titles so that either can be enacted without the other. Title I carries the revenue, the equal per-person dividend, in Worcester and everywhere else, and the worker pension and health guarantees. Title II carries the ceiling on extraction and the ban on new capacity. That separation is deliberate, and I would value your judgment on how a rule from your committee could treat them.
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.
Will you be an original cosponsor, and will you talk with me about the Rules 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