[Date]
The Honorable Ilhan Omar
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Omar,
Your End Polluter Welfare Act, H.R. 4714, would end more than $190 billion in fossil fuel tax breaks and subsidies over ten years, and you introduced it as an answer to the new handouts in last year's reconciliation law. I am writing because the bill I wrote starts where yours leaves off, and I would like you to be an original cosponsor.
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, or 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.
The two bills fit together. Section 104 of ELBA ends intangible drilling cost expensing, percentage depletion and the oil-recovery credits for the large covered companies, and then goes further, by taxing their excess profits and ending extraction on a statutory schedule. You have also described a Green New Deal that centers the communities most harmed by pollution. ELBA reserves at least 40 percent of its transition benefits for disadvantaged communities and sets aside 15 percent of the community transition money for Tribes, off the top.
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. I don't blame ordinary people who were duped, myself included. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
Will you be an original cosponsor in January, and help me present ELBA as the partner to your subsidy repeal? As a Budget Committee member, your judgment on how Title I could travel in reconciliation would be invaluable.
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