The Fed has pulled out its big guns, slashing interest rate targets to zero and announcing $700 billion worth of new quantitative easing. Republican Senator Mitt Romney seems to support giving every American $1,000, and Republicans in general are getting behind paid sick leave. Paul Krugman is calling for the government to spend 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product per year on a permanent stimulus. And New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio over the weekend floated the idea of the “nationalization of crucial factories and industries that produce medical supplies,” citing the example of the domestic mobilization for World War II.

Nationalization, as I wrote earlier this month, has a long and proud tradition of navigating America through times of crisis, from World War II to 9/11. No sector may be facing as profound a crisis right now as the oil and gas industry. With crashing oil prices, all manner of stimulus measures on the table, and previously tight-fisted politicians now thinking more creatively, nationalizing the fossil fuel industry might just be one of the most sensible ideas on offer.

For the last week, the White House has reportedly been exploring low-interest loans to a struggling fossil fuel industry. Talk of a bailout is in the air, spurred on in part by longtime Trump ally and fracking magnate Harold Hamm. In the first concrete move on this front, Donald Trump promised to have the Department of Energy buy up oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and “fill it right up to the top,” although that didn’t do much to stop oil prices from sinking to below $30 a barrel on Monday; there’s only so much it can hold, after all.

None of the options being floated by the administration will fix the lingering crisis facing America’s unconventional oil and gas sector. At best, they’ll stave off a reckoning for a little while longer. Kathy Hipple, a financial analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, has been tracking evolving trends in the debt-ridden oil and gas sector for the last decade. “A bailout of a once-thriving industry that needs some help during a downturn is one thing,” she said. “But we’ve got evidence that this industry has failed to produce a positive cash flow for a decade. The logic of bailing out a failing industry, that has failed even when oil prices were much higher, would be political. It would not be economic.”

Sold on the promise that improving efficiency would eventually yield big profits, investors on Wall Street gave shale drillers improbable quantities of cash for nearly a decade after the last recession, loading companies up with the debt made possible by federal policy responses to it. Those expected profits never materialized, and the sector has seen a rash of bankruptcies in the last several years. By last summer, it had effectively lost access to the cheap credit that enabled the boom. “There is no business case to be made for fracking,” Hipple told me. “If you had a child with a lemonade stand that every day spent more money on lemons and sugar than they got selling lemonade, eventually you would say there’s no business case for that lemonade stand.”