[Date]
Representative-elect Claire Valdez
Member-elect, 120th Congress (NY-7)
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Representative-elect Valdez,
Congratulations. You told Jacobin that you want to make the Green New Deal real, and to win a federal jobs guarantee. I am writing to ask you to be an original cosponsor of a bill that puts both ideas in the same law: ending the fossil industry on a statutory schedule while guaranteeing the livelihoods of the workers it leaves behind.
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.
As a union organizer you will know the parts that matter most to me. A displaced fossil worker keeps 100 percent of the old wage for three years and 70 percent for two more, with health premiums paid and the pensions guaranteed, including the United Mine Workers plans. These are entitlements, not grants that Congress can starve next year. Every project funded under the bill pays prevailing wages, uses a project labor agreement above $10 million, and gives hiring priority to those workers. For Brooklyn and Queens households, the dividend is an equal share per person, with children counted in full, no income phase-down, and no offset or garnishment, including for child support.
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. Until 2014 I believed what Exxon sold me about carbon dioxide and climate models, and 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 is to sign on as an original cosponsor when ELBA is introduced in January. It is more aggressive than anything yet filed, including Rep. Khanna's windfall tax, and it will need members who can say plainly why workers are the reason to pass it, not the obstacle.
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