[Date]
The Honorable Sheldon Whitehouse
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Whitehouse,
In March you introduced the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act, S. 4111, with Rep. Khanna. And in July 2025 you gave your 300th "Time to Wake Up" speech. I am writing to ask you to carry a bill that takes the next step those speeches point toward.
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. 4111 claws back a price spike and hands it to households. ELBA is deliberately more aggressive: it ends the profit in extraction itself, on a schedule written into law. It does not stack on your tax. Because courts are where this will be fought, the bill includes fallback charges if a tax is struck down, and pays any takings award from the Judgment 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 lead the Senate companion, with Rep. Khanna in the House if he is willing. Your seats on Finance and Environment and Public Works are where Title I's reconciliation path and Title II's ceiling would be tested. A hearing in either would be a start.
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