[Date]
The Honorable Jeff Merkley
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Merkley,
Congratulations on your re-election. You have led the Keep It in the Ground Act with Rep. Huffman, and this June you introduced a bill to keep LNG exports from raising what households and businesses pay. Both are the questions a bill I wrote tries to answer together.
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 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.
Section 203 would end federal leasing, including under the 2025 reconciliation law's mandates, and offer to buy back nonproducing leases, paid from the Judgment Fund and not the transition fund. Section 204 caps LNG and other exports under a no-fee license quota that falls to zero. A hotter Oregon is not abstract; your state lived through the 2021 heat dome.
I have a daughter who will spend her life in the world we are making. 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 ask you to be an original Senate cosponsor, and to look at the leasing and export sections with the eye of someone who has written them before. As ranking member of Budget, you also know what the Byrd rule will do to Title I. I would welcome your advice, and a hearing if you can help find one.
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