[Date]
The Honorable Bernard Sanders
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Sanders,
You have led the End Polluter Welfare Act with Rep. Omar, and you were an original cosponsor of Sen. Whitehouse's Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, S. 4111. After Vermont's floods you tied them plainly to climate change. I am writing to ask you to take the next step with a bill I wrote.
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.
Three parts speak to your work. ELBA repeals fossil tax preferences for the companies it taxes, as your bill does, and goes on to tax the profit itself. The dividend is equal for everyone, with no income phase-down and a full share for each child. And the worker guarantees include full wages for three years, health premiums, and a pension guarantee that names the United Mine Workers 1974 plan.
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 co-lead the Senate companion with Sen. Whitehouse. Your Finance seat is where Title I's reconciliation path would be tested, and the labor and pension provisions deserve your HELP Committee's eye.
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