[Date]
The Honorable Chris Van Hollen
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Van Hollen,
You made the Polluters Pay Climate Fund Act, S. 25, your first action of this Congress. You have also joined the Keep It in the Ground Act and the End Polluter Welfare Act. That is why I am writing: I wrote a bill that asks the question after yours.
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.
S. 25 asks who pays for the damage already done by emissions since 2000. ELBA asks that we stop adding to it, and returns the money to people rather than to the industry's balance sheets. The two belong in one conversation. ELBA also reserves at least 40 percent of its transition benefits for disadvantaged communities, which echoes the environmental justice share in your fund.
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 be an original Senate cosponsor. S. 25 sits in the Finance Committee, where a Senate companion to ELBA would also go. I would also value your help finding a way into a Finance hearing, and your view, from Budget and Appropriations, on how Title I could move in reconciliation.
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