[Date]
Representative-elect Chris Rabb
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative-elect Rabb,
Congratulations on your win in Philadelphia. In Harrisburg you sponsored bills to move Pennsylvania to 100% renewable energy, and the 2023 version, House Bill 1740, paired that goal with a Just Transition Community Advisory Committee and a council for renewable-energy workforce development. That pairing of a hard target with real protection for workers is why I am writing.
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.
Three parts echo your work. Community transition boards would have a majority of local residents, workers and labor representatives. Refineries would have to publish a retirement and remediation plan, and monitor their fence lines in real time. And a displaced fossil worker would keep full wages for three years and 70% for two more. Philadelphia has seen a refinery close with its workers left behind; ELBA is written so that does not happen again. The groups that endorsed you described you as a supporter of federal polluter-pays legislation. ELBA is aimed at the same goal from the profit side.
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.
My ask: would you be an original cosponsor when the bill is introduced in January, and would you bring a Pennsylvania just-transition voice to it? I know ELBA goes further than any bill now in the House, and I would value your criticism of the worker provisions most.
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