[Date]
The Honorable Jill Tokuda
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative Tokuda,
On October 30 you spoke at the "No Immunity for Big Oil" rally on O'ahu against the federal bills that would dismiss the climate-deception suits filed by Hawai'i, Honolulu and Maui. You are also a cosponsor of H.R. 7960 and the End Polluter Welfare Act. I am writing to ask you to go one step further.
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 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 may matter at home. Native Hawaiian organizations count as Tribes for the transition funds, including the set-aside paid directly to them. The dividend goes to every resident in equal shares, children in full, with no income phase-down. And because ELBA acts nationally, Hawai'i's own suits and laws are not the only defense against the industry's lobbying.
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. We don't need a technology breakthrough; we need a moral one.
Two requests. Please consider being an original cosponsor in January. And if a hearing follows, would you help us find a witness from Hawai'i, perhaps a Maui fire survivor or a county official, to say what a hotter, costlier future looks like from the islands?
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