Oil prices entered a stunning free-fall this week as the industry ran low on places to store the petroleum it cant sell but keeps pumping amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The value of oil slated for delivery next month is at $30 below zero per barrel the first time in history the price of crude dipped into negative territory. The downturn has wiped billions from the balance sheets of industry titans like Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. The financial bloodbath analysts predicted last month overflowed as hundreds of U.S. oil producers limped toward bankruptcy and the industry laid off more than 6,000 workers in a single day.

Yet the chaos made a bullish investor out of a mortal enemy: climate activists. The worlds rapidly destabilizing climate, made worse by the industrys decadeslong propaganda war, has made the oil companies prime targets for hostile takeovers, as they struggle to provide the good-paying jobs and economic stability they insisted was the necessary trade-off for trashing the atmosphere.

While history is littered with dozens of examples of governments taking command of oil production, particularly during times of turmoil, none have attempted what environmentalists now propose in the United States: Take over the oil industry to euthanize it.

The Sunrise Movement, the youth campaigners behind the Green New Deal movement, declared the price drop our chance to publicly own oil & gas companies. Genevieve Guenther, director of the project End Climate Silence and a ubiquitous Twitter gadfly, heralded a once in a lifetime opportunity to nationalize the oil companies and administer their transformation and decline, adding that it literally feels like a nightmare that this opportunity is going to waste. New York Citys chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America joked that naysayers could no longer question whether the federal government had the budget for a fire-sale buyout.

Putting the government in charge of oil production is hardly the domain of tin-pot despots. State-owned oil companies control the majority of the worlds known oil reserves. And the U.S. has a rich history of nationalizing industries during times of global upheaval, particularly in the lead-up to the world wars.

But of the nearly five-dozen examples of government takeovers of oil production in the past century, none were carried out with the explicit goal of permanently sunsetting the industry. Skeptics warn that even if a nationalization effort were to survive legal challenges, federal watchdogs are unprepared to guard against the high risk of abuse and corruption in a state-run oil company, and that the incentives to curtail oil production are not as clear-cut as advocates imagine.

Why To Nationalize

Calls to nationalize the fossil fuel industry started mounting soon after President Donald Trump took office and began rolling back the emissions regulations enacted during Barack Obama s two terms in the White House. At first, it came across as a provocative thought exercise, meant to illustrate the length to which the government ought to go to stave off climate disaster and how relatively conservative the Obama administrations market-tweaking regulatory approach was in comparison.