What if, instead of showering whiny multinational corporations with buckets of public money to pour virtually unlimited amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the government took a more direct route? Gregory Brew—an historian who studies oil and the author of The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy and the Cold War, 1951-1954—floated the idea in May of the federal government starting a National Refining Company, which could restart idle assets at a loss to meet the immediate challenge themselves, then shut them back down once the crunch is over so as to speed along the energy transition. As he explained, virtually every other major oil producing country on earth has some say over how their natural resources are exploited and refined, making the U.S. something of an outlier in having to go begging to combative CEOs.

“The administration should be focusing on getting more crude to market while also trying to move the needle on decarbonization,” Brew told me over the phone. “Getting involved directly in the refining aspect of the industry could help with that. If companies are worried about refineries not being profitable in the near future, better to sell them to a public utility.”

Even a publicly-owned refinery company wouldn’t solve broader problems like sourcing tools and steel or finding enough workers that are trained to run such facilities. That work would likely be contracted out to existing crews; refineries could be run in partnership with industry. Getting a shuttered refinery up and running would still take several months. But having the state hold the keys also means it wouldn’t have an obligation to return fat profits to shareholders—either now or in the coming decades as refineries should be shutting down. “There’s no way that the energy transition in the oil and gas industry happens at a reasonable rate without greater state intervention,” Brew added.