Airlines and airports got $50 billion worth of loans and grants in the stimulus approved by Congress last month, along with a tax break that also extends to private jets. They might get more soon; the White House suggested he could announce further bailout measures this weekend. Top Democrats are urging Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, as he hands out bailout funds, not to impose any “unreasonable conditions” on the $2.7 trillion industry. The irony there is that airlines in the United States and around the world—now in a fight for their lives—are demanding a few unreasonable conditions of their own.

Reporting this week by Greenpeace’s investigative journalism publication Unearthed revealed that the International Air Transport Association (IATA) is instructing its members to lobby governments for a grab bag of tax exemptions and deregulatory measures as the pandemic unfolds, and which would stretch on well after it ends. One page of a letter sent out to IATA members urges them to seek a “collaborative approach” on “cost-cutting measures” with governments, for example mass firings. Unearthed also found that Emirates—the UAE’s state-owned airline—is pushing to avoid any new taxes through 2022. IATA has further called for amending and scaling back its only international framework for reducing industry emissions so as to “avoid an inappropriate economic burden on the sector.” If these companies get their wishes granted, it could be a disaster both for their employees, and, potentially, the planet.

America’s airline industry is already forty-plus years into a radical experiment with deregulation that’s gone off the rails. Airlines were formerly regulated as a public utility by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which regimented routes and ticket prices. They were then part of the first waves of deregulations that began during Jimmy Carter’s administration and exploded under Ronald Reagan, in tandem with Margaret Thatcher’s administration overseas. Deregulation was supposed to spur efficiency, with less expensive tickets for consumers. But within a few years companies were consolidating, and ticket prices had dropped by less than what they would have if the CAB had remained in control. This last decade, in particular, has seen increasing consolidation and a new suite of baggage fees, which brought in $5 billion for airlines in 2018. They’ve funneled the extra funds from nixing meals and seatback entertainment into boosting share prices. The biggest U.S. airlines poured 96 percent of their free cashflow into stock buybacks between 2010 and 2019.

These airlines are also notorious tax dodgers. In The American Prospect, Alexander Sammon has argued that this should all be grounds for nationalizing the airlines, or at the very least bringing them back under the kind of stringent federal oversight that defined an earlier era of air travel. This wouldn’t be unprecedented; the U.S. government nationalized airport security several months after 9/11 in forming the TSA. “The nationalization of the American airline industry could not only deliver travelers from the horrors of air travel,” Sammon writes, “but it could also forge a path out of our 2008-grade thinking when it comes to public intervention in the market.”

The lesson airline operators should take from this crisis is that, in a truly free market, the coronavirus might already have killed their companies. In the U.S., the industry now faces a 96 percent drop in traffic and has cut 71 percent of capacity, according to the industry group Airlines for America. Like shipping, airlines are not included in the Paris Agreement thanks, in part, to the difficulty of cross-border accounting. Instead, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)—a part of the United Nations—was tasked with arriving at a set of criteria by which the industry would reduce emissions worldwide, loosely in line with the Paris Agreement’s goals. They landed on what many considered to be the most lenient and circuitous possible path, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, or CORSIA. As its name suggests, the program is reliant almost entirely on controversial carbon offsetting programs, which have a tenuous relationship at best to actual emissions reductions.