[Date]
Representative-elect Donavan McKinney
Member-elect, 120th Congress (MI-13)
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative-elect McKinney,
Congratulations. On a Planet Detroit voter-guide questionnaire you called for breaking the stranglehold of monopoly utilities like DTE and Consumers Energy and for 100% clean, renewable energy. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of a bill that goes after the other half of that stranglehold: the fossil fuels the utilities and the refineries run on.
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.
Planet Detroit reported in July that state regulators approved air permits for a Marathon and MPLX expansion in southwest Detroit's 48217 neighborhood, less than a month after a flaring event at the refinery. ELBA would bar new or expanded refining capacity and require real-time, public fenceline monitoring that residents can enforce by citizen suit. Each refinery would file a retirement and remediation plan, and fenceline residents could get voluntary relocation help. Households under 200 percent of the poverty line could not be billed more than 6 percent of income for home energy, and utilities could not shut off service during extreme-heat warnings. The profits tax could not be passed through to ratepayers.
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, so I have some feeling for fenceline neighbors. 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.
My ask is to sign on as an original cosponsor when ELBA is introduced in January. It is more aggressive than anything yet filed, including Rep. Khanna's windfall tax. A founding cosponsor from Detroit, who introduced bills in Lansing to bar monopoly utilities like DTE from political donations, would help it get a serious hearing.
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