[Date]
The Honorable Lateefah Simon
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Simon,
You joined the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act in June and Rep. Khanna's Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, H.R. 7960, in July. Both ask the industry to pay for what it has done. I am writing to ask you to be an early or original cosponsor of a bill that goes to the root: the Extinguishing the Social License to Burn Fossils Act, ELBA, to be introduced in January.
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.
In the East Bay, the long fight over Chevron's Richmond refinery has been about pollution and what a refinery owes its neighbors. ELBA answers in two ways. Refineries, petrochemical plants and export terminals must monitor their fence lines in real time, publicly, with enforcement by citizen suit. Every refinery must publish a retirement and remediation plan, and at least 40 percent of transition benefits go to disadvantaged communities.
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. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
Will you sign on early? And would you tell me where the fenceline and community provisions fall short for the people who live beside these facilities? I would rather hear it before the bill is filed.
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