The Problem

The American fossil fuel industry is going to fade away, no matter who is in office. The only real question is whether it shrinks in an orderly way that protects the workers and communities that depend on it, or collapses and drags them down with it.

Right now, oil and gas production is at an all-time high. In 2025 the country pumped a record 13.6 million barrels of crude a day and a record 107.7 billion cubic feet of dry gas a day, and it sent more liquefied natural gas overseas than any country on earth. All of it is being sold into a market where clean energy gets cheaper every year and demand for fossil fuels is expected to peak within the decade. Wall Street sees it coming. Oil and gas investors have stopped betting on long-run growth. They are pulling their money out and handing it to shareholders instead of investing it into wells and refineries that take decades to pay off. One 2025 study, by Transition Risk Exeter and UKSIF, estimates that on the current path some $2.3 trillion in fossil fuel assets around the world will be left stranded and worthless by 2040, and that the United States is more exposed than almost any other country.

If Washington does nothing and lets this play out on its own, the ending is ugly. Towns get gutted. Workers are left stranded. Pension funds are wiped out. And energy prices spike as the old supply falls apart faster than clean power can take its place.

As the end comes into view, the largest and most respected producers are quietly selling their oldest, nearly-tapped-out wells to a bottom tier of small, thinly funded operators. The researchers who track these sales warn that the buyers often cannot afford the cleanup that comes due when the wells finally run dry. It is not an accident. The wells get pumped to the last drop, the small operator goes bankrupt, and the bill for plugging them, cleaning up the site, and paying the pensions lands on the public. That is how hundreds of thousands of wells across the country ended up abandoned, and how workers lost pensions their employers had promised them. A business winding itself down by walking away from its own mess is the clearest possible case for the government to step in, run the wind-down honestly, and make the companies that pocketed the profits clean up after themselves.

The Mission

The Mission for America will bring the nation's fossil fuel workers into the clean economy, while the government manages the orderly wind-down of the industry that has powered America for a century. In the process, the Mission will run the wind-down on a published, mandatory schedule, prevent a disorderly system-wide collapse of the fossil asset base, remediate environmental damage, repurpose physical infrastructure for clean energy and hydrogen production, keep the lights on and energy prices stable for consumers, and show the world that fossil fuels can be retired gracefully instead of through chaos and collapse.

This chapter is fundamentally different from every other chapter in the Mission for America. Everywhere else the RFC finances new industry into existence. Here it manages the orderly decline of an existing one, deploying its full build-and-convert toolkit to repurpose every asset worth saving and retire the rest, while protecting the workers and communities that depended on it.

Everything in this plan is built around one organizing tool: a public, mandatory schedule for winding fossil fuel production down, year by year, across the decade. The schedule will not start steep. It will begin with gentle cuts and steepen over the decade as electric cars, heat pumps, and clean power pull down the demand underneath it. The one firm rule is that production never falls faster than demand does, so supply and demand come down together and the country is never left short.

The schedule will target the fuel itself, not emissions, so no company can game it with a promise to capture the carbon someday. The government will enforce it with tools it already has and can use cleanly. It will tie federal subsidies and tax credits to hitting the annual target. It will retire federal drilling and mining leases on a set timeline. And it will let the growing clean economy naturally retire the demand for the product. What it will not do is order privately owned wells on state land to switch off. Under the Fifth Amendment, when the government forces a business to stop using property it owns, it can be made to pay that business for the loss, so simply commanding wells shut would hand the industry an enormous bill at public expense. Working through subsidies, leases, and demand will reach the same place without writing that check.

The schedule is also a two-way promise. No fossil-fueled power plant shuts down until the clean power meant to replace it is built, running, and proven able to keep the lights on through any kind of weather.

The federal government will guarantee every fossil fuel worker who loses a job to the transition immediate enrollment, at full previous pay, in the training the Workforce Mission runs, and a good job at the end of it. For many workers the move is short, because the skills carry over. A welder or heavy-equipment operator can plug abandoned wells. A pipefitter can retool a refinery for cleaner fuels or help build what replaces it. But the choice belongs to the worker. A coal miner who would rather become a teacher or an electrician will get the Mission's help doing that instead.

The RFC will establish a dedicated Transition Division, modeled on the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process that manages military base closures, to plan and execute the managed wind-down of America's fossil fuel system as a coordinated whole rather than a chaotic facility-by-facility collapse. The division will deploy three RFC models: Co-Investor loans for companies that cooperate, a Public Acquisition Backstop for assets whose owners abandon or refuse to safely wind them down, and GOCO (Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated) arrangements for critical infrastructure like pipelines and storage caverns that can be repurposed. None of this is the forced well-shutdown ruled out above. The schedule will still run on subsidies, leases, and falling demand. These models only decide what happens to the companies and assets caught in that decline, and the acquisition backstop buys assets at fair value rather than seizing them.

The federal government will launch a remediation and repurposing sprint. Hundreds of thousands of orphaned oil and gas wells will be plugged. Mountaintop removal sites will be restored for farming and clean energy. Retired coal power plants will become sites for solar, battery storage, and in some cases advanced nuclear reactors. Salt caverns along the Gulf Coast will be converted into strategic reserves of clean hydrogen. A few refineries will be rebuilt to make renewable diesel and clean jet fuel. The rest will leave behind prepared industrial sites and skilled crews for new clean-energy plants. Gas stations will become EV charging hubs and community centers.

In addition, the RFC will defend consumers. An active commodity trading desk will stabilize fuel prices during the transition decade, preventing speculators from exploiting the managed supply decline. Priority supply allocations will ensure that the sectors that genuinely cannot electrify yet (aviation, shipping, emergency vehicles, military operations, remote industrial sites) get the fuel they need while demand declines everywhere else.

The RFC will take equity stakes in fossil fuel companies not to extract value but to restructure them for transition. Cooperative companies will receive 30-year, low-interest loans to retool the refineries, pipelines, and production facilities that can genuinely be reused, and to redevelop the sites of those that must come down. The government will acquire critical infrastructure and contract experienced operators to run it under binding transition mandates. Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) in fossil fuel regions will receive RFC capitalization to fund what those communities actually need: housing, healthcare, broadband, small business lending, and main street revitalization. Tax credits for clean energy and transition investment will be restored and expanded with full refundability.

The money will come in two forms, and they should not be confused. Most of it, the acquisitions, the retooling loans, and the equity stakes, will run off the RFC's balance sheet the way the original Reconstruction Finance Corporation's did in the 1930s, and most of it will come back. The loans will be repaid. The equity will be sold once converted assets regain their value. The cost of buying assets will be held down by the same stranding this chapter describes, because a business the market is already writing off does not command a high price. The part that takes real government spending is smaller, and it is named plainly. It will cover the pay guarantee for workers, the Community Revenue Trust for affected towns, and the well-plugging sprint, which is labor-heavy work ready to start now. This is not a trillion-dollar giveaway to oil companies. It is patient money that mostly comes back, plus a defined public investment in the workers and towns the wind-down touches. New Consensus is also proposing a wealth tax that would cover the public share.

Solutions

Solution 1: The Workforce Guarantee (Every Worker Transitioned at Pay Parity)

The human cost of the fossil fuel transition is real, and the Mission for America will not minimize it. Roughly 870,000 workers produce the country's petroleum, natural gas, and coal, according to the U.S. Energy and Employment Report. Wages vary enormously: the broader fuels-sector median is about $62,780 a year, while non-retail oil and gas employees average around $135,000. Evidence suggests, counterintuitively, that fossil fuel jobs may lag behind clean energy roles in healthcare and retirement benefits, but the paychecks are large, especially in extraction and offshore operations, and the cultural identity attached to the work runs deep.

The Mission's workforce guarantee is simple and expansive: every fossil fuel worker who loses their job because of the managed transition will keep their previous wage from the day of layoff, without interruption, through retraining and all the way into the job that follows, however long that placement takes, and no facility will be retired until replacement jobs exist in that same labor market.

Pay parity means the job that follows, not just the training. Retraining alone does not protect a paycheck. An offshore driller earning six figures who retrains into well-plugging walks into work that pays a fraction of that. So the guarantee is built to land each worker in a comparable job at comparable pay, and to fill the gap when it cannot.

For most workers, the new job itself is the guarantee. At the median, clean energy jobs already pay about what fossil fuel jobs pay, so a worker placed in a comparable role will be made whole by the paycheck and will need nothing more. The gap is real, but it is concentrated among the highest earners in extraction and offshore work, where the wage was built over decades on the job.

Where the job that follows still pays less, the Mission will cover the full gap, dollar for dollar, for five years. The one condition is work, not the kind of work. This is a top-up on the wages a worker is actually earning, not a payment for staying home, so it will run only while the worker holds a job and will end if they walk away from it. A driller who spent 20 years earning six figures will keep their old standard of living for five full years while they build seniority in the new field, whether that is a nuclear plant or a high-school classroom. They will do it in a country where the cost of living itself is falling. With health care and child care free, groceries cheaper through the public food network, and public transit expanded, the same wage will stretch further than it used to. For workers close to the end of their careers, the retirement bridge below will do this work instead.

Or take the money and go. Any worker can turn down the whole apparatus and take a lump-sum severance instead, sized as a share of their old pay that grows with every year they worked. Someone with a few years in will get a real cushion of several months' pay. A 30-year veteran can walk away with close to two years of full salary in hand. What comes next is theirs, a new trade, a business, school, or a move across the country. The choice belongs to the worker.

A bridge to retirement for older workers. A 58-year-old miner is not going to retrain as a hydrogen technician, and pretending otherwise helps no one. Every transition that actually held, from Germany's to Spain's coal agreements, was built on early retirement rather than universal retraining. So a worker within roughly 10 years of retirement will get a different path. The Mission will carry them at close to their full pay, with health care, all the way to retirement age, and will make their pension whole when they get there. For these workers, reaching retirement with their income and pension intact is the transition.

Pensions and retiree health care guaranteed, not just mourned. Every deal the RFC makes, whether it finances a company, buys an asset, or takes over a piece of infrastructure, will carry the same hard condition. The pension and retiree health-care promises made to that company's workers will be taken on in full and fully funded. There is no version of the deal where a company hands off its plants and leaves its retirees behind. And when an employer goes bankrupt and walks away from those promises, a federal backstop will stand behind the workers so the pension is paid anyway. The model already exists. Congress did exactly this for coal miners in the Bipartisan American Miners Act, putting federal money behind pensions and health benefits that a wave of coal bankruptcies had put at risk. This Mission will extend that same guarantee to every worker the wind-down touches.

Labor at the table, not just briefed. The president will negotiate the transition framework with organized labor. Every project financed under this program will be built under a project labor agreement and pay Davis-Bacon prevailing wages, both attached as conditions of the federal funding. Converted and GOCO facilities will operate under neutrality so they stay union, and organized labor will hold a statutory seat on the Transition Division commission.

Everyone the wind-down touches, not just plant employees. The guarantee will not be limited to workers on a single facility's payroll. It will reach the roving oilfield-service crews who move from rig to rig, the tanker drivers and terminal hands who move fuel around the country, and the people working the counter at the nation's 150,000 gas stations. All of them will sign up through the same Workforce Mission, on the same terms, as the workers inside the plants.

How it connects to the Workforce Mission. The federal staffing agency the Workforce Mission builds will run the placement, and it will have two jobs. For a worker whose skills carry straight over, it will place them directly into a clean-economy job that uses those skills. A coal plant operator will move to an advanced nuclear plant. A pipefitter will help retool a refinery for cleaner fuels or build the plant that takes its place. A driller will plug abandoned wells. For a worker who wants a genuine change of career, it will retrain them for whatever they choose, another part of the Mission for America or a vocation outside it entirely, from teaching to nursing to social work to a skilled trade. No one will be forced to stay in energy, and the pay-parity guarantee will follow the worker into the new job whatever it pays.

What this delivers: A pay parity guarantee for every fossil fuel worker displaced by the managed transition, with a clear path to either a similar job in the clean economy or a fully funded change of direction.

Solution 2: The Managed Wind-Down (RFC-Led Reorganization and Institutional Design)

The Mission will build the first institution in American history capable of managing the orderly decline of a major industry: a Transition Division inside the RFC, with the authority, the financing tools, and the legal backing to wind down the fossil fuel system on a schedule that protects workers, keeps energy prices stable, and leaves no community behind. The RFC will match every type of company with the right intervention, whether that means financing a willing partner's conversion, acquiring a resistant holdout, or taking public ownership of infrastructure too critical to leave in private hands.

The RFC Transition Division. The Mission will build a dedicated Transition Division inside the RFC and give it the authority, the money, and the clear chain of command to run the wind-down. The Division will plan the order and timing of the shutdowns, hold the financing tools, and answer for the result. Keeping the job inside one institution built to do it, rather than scattered across a dozen agencies that each own a piece, is what makes coordinated action possible.

Working with those departments is not the same as splitting the job among them. The Division will keep the authority and the financing in one place and reach into each department only for the specific tools it owns, never handing any of them a share of the decision. It will draw on the Department of the Interior, which issues and manages the federal land and mineral leases the wind-down will turn off. It will draw on the Department of Labor, which runs the Workforce Mission and the pay guarantee. And it will draw on the Department of Agriculture, which holds the rural development and land-restoration tools affected counties will need. The Department of Energy will advise on grid and technical questions, and its Loan Programs Office is a useful model for the RFC's own financing. But the coordinating authority will stay with the RFC, so no single agency's turf or caution can stall the transition.

The closest domestic precedent is BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure), the process the Department of Defense uses to close military bases. BRAC works because it creates an independent commission that makes recommendations, which Congress then votes on as a package, preventing the political dynamic where every member of Congress fights to keep their local base open while agreeing in principle that bases should close. The fossil fuel transition needs the same structure: expert-led sequencing that Congress approves or rejects as a whole, not facility-by-facility political warfare.

Three RFC models for three types of companies. The fossil fuel industry is not monolithic. Some companies will cooperate with the transition. Some will resist. Some operate infrastructure too critical to leave in private hands during a managed decline. The RFC will deploy a different model for each. The dividing line is not just cooperation but function: a willing owner will keep and convert an asset the region can live without, but any asset that must keep running for the whole regional system to work will go GOCO regardless of who owns it, acquired first if the owner will not cooperate.

The Co-Investor Model: for companies that cooperate. This is the preferred path. Companies that voluntarily commit to transition plans will receive RFC financing on terms no private lender can match:

• 30-year, low-interest loans for the conversions that genuinely work, such as rebuilding a refinery for renewable diesel and jet fuel or repurposing a pipeline to carry captured CO2, and for redeveloping the sites and installing renewable energy where the old assets must come down instead
• Loan guarantees for companies raising private capital for conversion projects, reducing the risk premium that makes transition financing expensive
• Advanced Market Commitments guaranteeing purchase volumes for the clean products those converted facilities make, such as renewable fuels, clean hydrogen, and carbon storage

The financial logic is straightforward: a cooperative company with $10 billion in fossil fuel assets facing stranding can either watch those assets become worthless over the next decade, or it can partner with the RFC and receive the financing to convert a meaningful portion of that value into clean economy assets that retain and grow in value. It is the best deal these companies will ever get.

The Public Acquisition Backstop: for assets nobody will safely wind down. Almost every company will take the Co-Investor deal, because it is the best offer they will ever get. Acquisition is the backstop for the rare company that will not. It is for the owner who abandons a dying asset without cleaning it up, refuses to wind one down safely, or sits on a piece of infrastructure the whole region depends on and still will not cooperate.

In those cases the government will buy the asset outright and wind it down itself, on a schedule that protects the workers, the community, and the energy supply. This is a purchase at fair value, not a seizure. The tool is eminent domain, the same long-standing power under the Fifth Amendment the government uses to buy the land for a highway or a power line. It can take private property for a public purpose as long as it pays fair value for it. Congress will approve these purchases as a package, so no single company can lobby its way to a personal exemption, and a Senate-confirmed official will decide each case against published rules rather than by singling out a company by name.

The point of the backstop is not to nationalize the industry. It is to make sure that when a company walks away, the asset will still get wound down safely and the mess will still get cleaned up, instead of being dumped on the public the way it is today.

Why this holds up in court. The plan does not pretend the legal ground is easy. It answers each hard question in its design. The first problem is that courts have grown skeptical of a president stretching an old, general law to do something big and new, and winding down a national industry is exactly the kind of move that draws that skepticism. So the plan will not rely on old laws. Congress will pass a new one in the first 100 days, the charter that creates the Transition Division, and that charter will spell out plainly what the government may do. The authority is fresh, specific, and voted on, not improvised from a statute written for another purpose.

The second problem is that the government may not single out particular companies for punishment. The Constitution forbids it. So the commission that plans the wind-down will never name a company for takeover. It will publish neutral rules and an order of operations, both set by the statute. Its members will be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the same way the commission that closes military bases works. And the decision to buy any specific asset will be made by a confirmed official applying those published rules, never by writing a company's name into a law.

For those reasons, the acquisitions that need new legal authority will wait until the charter passes. The Day One actions will be limited to what the president can already do without a new statute. The government will move in the right order, and that order is part of why it wins.

Federal coal leases: the strongest lever, because it runs through the government's own land. About 40 percent of American coal is mined on federal land, most of it in the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana. The government already owns that coal. Companies pay for the right to dig it out. That makes the government the landlord, and a landlord has moves a regulator does not.

The easiest is to stop signing new leases and to turn down pending applications. That costs almost nothing and keeps the problem from growing. Next, every federal coal lease comes up for review after 20 years and every 10 years after that, and the government will use those reviews to tighten the terms on royalties, on cleanup, and on how fast a company must actually mine what it leased.

The hardest move is retiring a lease that is still producing. These leases do not simply run out. By law they last as long as coal keeps coming out of the ground. So ending one early means either canceling it because the company broke the rules, which a court will second-guess, or buying it back at fair value, which costs real money. The Mission will budget for that buyback rather than pretending it is free.

This lever reaches only coal on federal land. Private and state oil and gas, like the wells of the Permian and the Bakken, come down a different way, through the Co-Investor deal, the acquisition backstop, and above all the falling demand and the federal money tied to the schedule. In every case, the Transition Division will pair the wind-down with the job guarantee and the community revenue program in Solution 3, so every job lost and every dollar of county revenue lost will be matched by a replacement.

Foreign investment treaties: a fight worth having. There is one more legal front, and it runs outside U.S. courts. A set of trade and investment treaties lets foreign-owned companies, and foreign subsidiaries of American ones, sue the United States before international arbitration panels when a government action costs them money. This mechanism is called investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS. Winding down production could trigger those claims, and the panels tend to value them generously, on the profits a company expected to earn rather than on what the asset is worth today. TC Energy tried exactly this, demanding $15 billion over the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, before an arbitration panel dismissed the claim in 2024 on jurisdictional grounds. The exposure is real, but it is narrow. It reaches only treaty-protected foreign-owned assets, a small slice of the industry.

The plan does not flinch at it. An old investment treaty is an agreement on paper, and the United States is not going to let one stop the country from remaking its own energy system. Any company that wants to haul the government before an arbitration panel is welcome to try. It will not slow the transition down, and it is a fight most Americans will be glad to have: a foreign oil company demanding billions from U.S. taxpayers for the right to keep drilling.

The country will also stop handing these claims a foothold. The United States will lead a Climate Club of major economies that agree to take climate measures out of their investment treaties and to stop suing one another over the energy transition. The Foreign Policy chapter carries that diplomacy. And because these treaties often protect existing investments for a decade after a country withdraws, the Transition Division will plan its acquisitions around the exposure from the start rather than walking into an avoidable claim.

Once an asset is in public hands, the Transition Division will wind it down at a pace that protects its workers, its community, and the energy supply. The price the government pays will be fair market value, set by a court, not named by the government itself. There is a long-standing rule for exactly this situation. When the government buys property for a public project, a court leaves out any change in the property's value that the project itself caused, up or down. So the government cannot be forced to pay a premium its own program created, and it also cannot lowball an owner by pointing to a slump its own program caused. The value a court settles on is what the asset was really worth on the open market.

The GOCO Model: for critical infrastructure. Some fossil fuel infrastructure cannot be shut down immediately and cannot be trusted to private operators whose incentives are misaligned with the transition. Pipelines that must keep moving fuel to essential users until the very end of the drawdown, natural gas storage caverns that will become strategic hydrogen reserves, and processing facilities that serve hard-to-abate sectors during the transition all need public ownership with professional operations under binding government mandates. The RFC will acquire the asset, contract an experienced operator, and set the transition timeline. The operator will run the facility day-to-day.

When a company goes bankrupt, be the buyer, not the one left holding the bag. Many companies will neither cooperate nor fight. They will simply file for bankruptcy, and at that point a bankruptcy court, not the RFC, controls what happens to the assets. Coal already shows how this goes. Peabody Energy, the largest coal producer in the country, and Alpha Natural Resources, one of the biggest in Appalachia, both used bankruptcy to walk away from pension and health-care promises. A cleanup-insurance scheme called self-bonding collapsed and left states holding worthless IOUs for the cleanup. And when operators like Blackjewel shut down and walked off, their unreclaimed mines became orphans the public now has to clean up, the coal version of the abandoned wells this Mission is already committed to plugging.

So the plan will treat bankruptcy as a main route, not a surprise. When a fossil fuel company goes under, the RFC will step in as a buyer inside the bankruptcy itself, purchasing the assets worth keeping through the court's own sale process. It will make any rescue financing it provides conditional on the buyer taking on the pension, health-care, and cleanup obligations instead of dumping them. And the legislative package will close the self-bonding loophole for good, so a company can no longer promise to clean up after itself with money it does not have and then leave the bill to the public.

There is a bigger danger here too. A great deal of fossil fuel debt, the corporate bonds and bank loans behind these companies, is held by banks, insurers, and pension funds. If that debt goes bad all at once, it could set off exactly the kind of financial shock this Mission exists to prevent. So the Transition Division will work with the Federal Reserve and the federal financial regulators to bring the debt down in an orderly way rather than letting it blow up.

Governance demonstrations: system-level, not one-at-a-time. There is a critical error to avoid: buying or closing individual facilities one at a time. If the RFC acquires a single refinery in a regional market, the remaining refineries gain market power and can raise prices. The transition must operate at the system level, managing all the facilities in a regional fuel market simultaneously.

Some systems need special handling. A few pieces of the fossil fuel system do not wind down gracefully. They fail once they drop below a certain level. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline is the clearest case. As less oil flows through it, the physics turn against it. The oil cools, wax and water settle out, ice forms, and the crude can thicken until restarting the line after a shutdown becomes very hard. So North Slope production cannot just be tapered toward zero and left to coast. Winding it down takes real engineering and real money. It is also tangled up with Alaska's finances, because the state has no state income or sales tax and built its budget and its Permanent Fund on North Slope oil. The Transition Division will plan systems like this one on their own, so the last step down is a deliberate decision rather than an accidental shutdown that strands an entire state.

What this delivers: An RFC Transition Division modeled on BRAC. Three RFC intervention models matched to company behavior. First-wave regional governance demonstrations before nationwide rollout. The legal and institutional framework for the only entity that can coordinate an orderly decline: the federal government.

Solution 3: Remediation, Repurposing, and Community Resilience

The fossil fuel industry leaves behind two kinds of inheritance: environmental damage that must be cleaned up, and physical infrastructure that can be converted to clean uses. Both represent enormous job-creation opportunities. And underneath both is a harder challenge: rebuilding the economic identity and tax base of communities that have depended on extraction revenue for generations.

The remediation sprint. The United States has somewhere between 300,000 and 3 million abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells. The range is that wide because nobody has ever conducted a comprehensive national inventory. Unplugged wells leak methane (a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than CO2 over 20 years) and contaminate groundwater. Plugging them is labor-intensive, skilled work that fossil fuel workers already know how to do. One Texas analysis estimates well plugging generates roughly 5.4 direct and indirect jobs per million dollars spent (about 9.8 including induced activity). The larger point is that it is labor-intensive, shovel-ready work that puts oil-field crews back to work quickly on cleanup that has to happen regardless. The Mission will launch a 10-year well-plugging and remediation sprint through the CCC track of the workforce program. Per-well costs vary significantly by regional geology, and no reliable national cost estimate is possible without a comprehensive well inventory. The first task is the inventory itself. The sprint is a decade-long bridge, not a career, and it will be treated as one. When a site is finished, the Workforce Guarantee will re-cover the crew and route it into the permanent work the remediation creates, the operations and maintenance of the clean assets and restored land that replace the well pad.

Mine land is opportunity, not just liability. Mountaintop removal sites across Appalachia can be reclaimed. Rotational grazing (cycling cattle, sheep, and poultry across restored land) has shown early results rebuilding topsoil on previously dead ground. Restored mine land can support agriculture, solar installations, or new industrial development. The remediation itself is the economic development program. The RFC will finance mine land restoration as an infrastructure investment with measurable returns: restored land value, new agricultural production, clean energy capacity, reduced environmental liability, and community economic activity.

Strategic infrastructure repurposing. The fossil fuel system leaves behind enormously valuable physical assets that cost billions to build and are already connected to roads, power grids, and industrial supply chains:

• Salt caverns to hydrogen storage. Natural gas storage caverns along the Gulf Coast are engineered to hold pressurized gas underground. Converting them to strategic green hydrogen reserves requires modification, not construction from scratch. The Hydrogen chapter details the storage requirements. This chapter provides the physical assets. A converted salt-cavern network can hold a strategic reserve of clean hydrogen, providing the same energy-security function the Strategic Petroleum Reserve provides today, for clean fuel. Hydrogen is far less energy-dense by volume than natural gas, so a given cavern stores a smaller share of its former energy content, and the conversion is real engineering work rather than a simple swap, but the assets that make it possible, the sealed geology, the surface handling, and the permits, are exactly what a hydrogen reserve would otherwise have to build from scratch.

• Retired power plant sites become solar and storage hubs. A coal or gas power plant sits on a large industrial lot that already has road access, a high-voltage connection to the grid, water rights, and industrial zoning. That combination is exactly what a new solar farm or battery-storage site needs and normally waits years to line up, which makes these among the most valuable clean-energy sites in the country. The Clean Power Mission needs them. Because the land is already industrial, these conversions qualify for fast-track permitting, so the new use can be built quickly. The same sites will also be strong candidates for advanced nuclear, if and when those reactors arrive, since a reactor can reuse a coal plant's turbine, cooling system, and grid connection, and the plant's own crews already know how to run an around-the-clock power station. That path is more speculative and rides on the Nuclear Mission, but where it pans out these towns will be first in line for it.

• A few refineries convert. The rest hand down sites and skilled crews. The honest version is narrow. A crude-oil refinery cannot simply be flipped into some other kind of plant, because its equipment is built for one job. But one conversion is real and already running at commercial scale. A handful of California refineries, Phillips 66 in Rodeo and Marathon in Martinez among them, have been rebuilt to make renewable diesel, and in Rodeo's case clean jet fuel, from fats, oils, and greases instead of crude, and they did it by reusing the refinery's existing processing units. The Mission will back that conversion where it makes sense. Just as valuable is what a retired refinery leaves behind even when the plant itself comes down: a permitted industrial site with grid and water hookups, deep-water shipping access, and, above all, a workforce that knows how to run complex chemical operations safely. Those sites and those workers will be redirected into the clean-fuel and clean-energy economy, which is most of what makes a from-scratch project slow and costly.

• Gas stations become EV charging and community hubs. The country has about 150,000 gas stations, most of them on commercial lots along busy roads with utility hookups already in place. That is a ready-made map for fast EV charging. The EVs Mission will set up a Gas Station Conversion Loan program inside the Small Business Administration, and this Mission will plug its station owners and workers into it. The loans will help an owner add fast chargers and build out what a charging stop can offer that a gas pump cannot, from a real convenience store and hot food to a place to sit and work while the car charges. The point is that the corner-station owner will come out of the transition ahead, not wiped out by it.

Repurpose the industry's know-how, not just its buildings. The most valuable thing the fossil economy leaves behind is not a refinery or a cavern. It is the ability to engineer and build hard things in hard places. The companies and shipyards that design, build, and install deep-water drilling rigs can build and install offshore wind. It is nearly the same work. The naval architecture, the heavy steel fabrication, the subsea engineering, the specialized ships, and the crews who run them all carry over from one to the other. The pattern repeats down the supply chain. The firms that fabricate oil and gas pipelines can fabricate the pipelines that will carry captured carbon. The RFC's Co-Investor loans and purchase commitments will be aimed squarely at this shift, turning the offshore-oil supply chain into the offshore-wind supply chain and keeping that industrial muscle in America, pointed at building the alternative. The goal is not just to recover the money trapped in the old industry. It is to put the industry itself to work on what comes next.

The Transition Community Revenue Trust. Some towns cannot be rebuilt by cleanup jobs and small-business loans alone, because extraction does not just employ people there. It pays for the government. In Wyoming, money from mining and drilling on federal land covers roughly a third of the state's entire K-12 school budget. No community lender, no battery factory, and no wind farm can replace a number that big on its own. Isolated counties across the Powder River Basin, parts of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, the Permian, and Alaska's North Slope all face the same problem. Their schools, hospitals, and roads are paid for by a tax base the wind-down will shut off faster than new local industry can grow up to replace it.

So the Mission will create the Transition Community Revenue Trust, a federal program that will backfill the money extraction has long provided for schools, hospitals, road crews, and local-government payrolls. It will not be a permanent blank check, which would only pay a county to stay dependent. The backfill will be sized to what each county actually loses, and it will shrink as that county builds a tax base of its own. A county will keep every dollar it raises from new industry, so the deal always rewards rebuilding rather than waiting. At its peak the program will cost somewhere in the low billions to low tens of billions of dollars a year, measured against the roughly $15 to $20 billion a year that oil, gas, and coal now pour into public budgets across the country, and it will be funded through the RFC's transition budget. Only a small, permanent core will remain at the end, for the handful of counties too isolated to ever replace the base. The money will flow through state and local governments by formula, so local officials will decide how to spend it.

The Trust will work hand in hand with the community lenders funded above. The lenders will build the new private economy. The Trust will keep the schools open and the ambulances running while that economy grows in. Together they will make sure no town is ever forced to choose between the transition and its own schoolhouse.

Tribal nations decide for themselves. A great deal of oil, gas, and coal sits on tribal land, and some nations lean heavily on that revenue. The Bakken runs under the MHA Nation. The Southern Ute have gas, the Navajo and Hopi have coal, the Osage have oil. The federal government cannot and will not order a sovereign nation to shut its wells. The Transition Division will work government to government, on each nation's own consent and its own timeline, and it will honor the federal trust responsibility with a revenue-replacement path at least as generous as the one offered to the counties above, so a nation that chooses to wind down does it with its schools, services, and self-government funded rather than stranded.

There is a hard truth to state plainly here. As the rest of the country stops burning these fuels and the refineries and power plants that buy them close, the market for oil, gas, and coal shrinks toward the few essential uses that remain. A nation is free to keep producing, but over time it will find fewer and fewer buyers. That is not a wind-down imposed on tribal land. It is the demand disappearing everywhere. The Mission's duty is to be honest that this is coming, to raise it with each nation early, and to put the replacement revenue and the new industry on the table in time, so no nation is left holding an asset the world has stopped buying with nothing to take its place. And tribal nations will be the first governments invited into the international Climate Club, part of the transition from the start rather than an afterthought at the end, with a full seat as it sets the terms and shares out the new industry it builds.

What this delivers: A 10-year remediation sprint plugging hundreds of thousands of wells and restoring mine land across Appalachia and the West. Strategic repurposing of fossil fuel infrastructure into clean economy assets, from salt caverns to hydrogen reserves, power plants to solar and nuclear sites, refineries to renewable fuel production, and gas stations to EV charging hubs. The industry's own capability redirected as well, with the offshore-oil supply chain turned to offshore wind and pipeline fabricators turned to hydrogen and CO2 lines. A Transition Community Revenue Trust that backfills lost extraction revenue for the schools, hospitals, and local governments of communities that cannot be industrially replaced, funded for decades.

Solution 4: Consumer Price Defense and Energy Security

The Mission will defend consumers on price, and it has two tools for the job. One is a public reserve of physical fuel that can steady the market and guarantee supply to the sectors that still depend on it. The other is a way to steer the remaining fuel to the uses that cannot yet run on anything else. The transition decade will be a tempting target for speculators, and for anyone looking to pin every price spike on the government. The Mission will be ready for them.

A physical reserve and a market cop, not price manipulation. The plan is honest about one thing up front. It is deliberately shrinking supply, so some upward pressure on price is the expected result of the policy, and no reserve can or should promise to erase it. What the government can do is two concrete things.

The first is to hold a reserve of actual fuel, the way the Strategic Petroleum Reserve already does. When a storm or a shock sends prices lurching, the reserve will release fuel to steady the market, and above all it will guarantee physical supply to the essential sectors below when something disrupts the flow. The reserve will be run in the open, with a hard yearly limit on how much it can spend, so it can never be drained trying to defend a particular price.

The second is to police the market for cheating. When a trader actually manipulates prices, by cornering a market or faking demand, the government will meet it with the kind of surveillance and enforcement the Commodity Futures Trading Commission already uses. In practice that means watching the futures and physical markets in close to real time, requiring large traders to report their positions, capping how big a single position can grow so no one player can corner supply, and using subpoena power to open the books when the trading data looks wrong. A trader caught rigging the market will face heavy civil penalties and a ban from trading, because that is what it takes to break a speculator.

The desk will not be there to prop up failing producers, and it may never be used to hold prices above the managed decline or to slow the schedule. And because a government desk trading fuel while the Transition Division knows exactly which companies are being wound down is an obvious conflict of interest, the two will be kept strictly apart, with the desk's positions published and inspectors general and the GAO monitoring their activity.

A transition energy dividend for households. A shrinking fossil supply while millions still drive gasoline cars and heat with gas means higher pump and heating bills in the middle years, before the clean substitutes reach everyone, and that burden falls hardest on rural and lower-income households who cannot yet afford an EV or a heat pump. The Mission will meet it directly with a transition energy dividend. Every household will get the rebate, with the largest checks going to the rural and lower-income families who feel the price pressure most, and it will be funded from the price-defense program, so no family is asked to carry the cost of the wind-down at the pump while it waits its turn for the cleaner, cheaper option.

Export drawdown. About a third of the crude the country produces is sold abroad rather than burned at home, roughly 4 million barrels a day. On top of that it exports around 7 million barrels a day of refined products, and more liquefied natural gas than any other nation ships. A wind-down aimed only at domestic demand would leave all of that in place. So the schedule will govern total production, exports included. Crude and refined-product exports will come down on the same schedule as domestic supply. Liquefied natural gas will come down more slowly, on a path coordinated with allies. After 2021, US gas became Europe's largest source of imported LNG and helped cut Russia's share of EU gas imports from more than 40 percent before the war to around 11 percent today, and it now supplies Japan, Korea, and European allies under long-term contracts. Its drawdown will be timed to those partners' own clean-energy buildout, so the United States neither pulls supply out from under an ally nor hands the market back to Russia and OPEC. The Climate Club will take this further. Its members will coordinate the timing of their own drawdowns and pledge not to pump more to replace the barrels the United States retires, so the wind-down takes oil and gas off the world market instead of just moving the drilling somewhere else. This is the plan's strongest energy-security argument. As the country stops needing oil and gas at home, its exposure to any OPEC or Russian price shock falls toward zero. A clean-power system backed by a hydrogen reserve is an energy base no petrostate can embargo, which is what energy independence was always supposed to mean.

Steering the last of the fuel to the uses that need it. Some parts of the economy cannot switch to electricity on the same clock as the rest. Aviation, ocean shipping, and parts of the military will still need liquid fuel past the 10-year window. So will backup generators and disaster-response equipment that has to run when the grid is down, heavy off-road machinery like large farm and construction equipment, and specialized vehicles that work for days far from any charger. The Transition Division will manage the shrinking pool of fossil fuel production to keep these hard-to-electrify users supplied as everyday demand falls away. Instead of a chaotic scramble over a dwindling supply, the managed decline will make sure the users who genuinely need liquid fuel have it, while everyone who can electrify does so on schedule.

Petrochemical feedstock is a lasting demand, not a rounding error. Not all oil and gas is burned. Roughly a seventh of oil, and a large share of natural gas liquids, is feedstock for plastics, chemicals, and fertilizer, demand that electrifying cars and buildings does not retire, and it is the fastest-growing slice of oil use. The Mission is honest that this class persists on its own, slower timeline. The crackers and chemical plants that serve it are not simply converted to hydrogen the way a fuel refinery can be, and the drawdown of feedstock production will track the separate work of decarbonizing petrochemicals through recycling and bio- and e-based feedstocks rather than the fuel schedule. The Industry Mission carries that work in detail. The same logic covers the heaviest cuts of the barrel, the ones never burned at all. Bitumen binds roads and roofs, and base oils and waxes become lubricants and sealants, their carbon locked into durable products rather than the air. A small, managed slice of refining stays open to supply them, alongside the recycled asphalt, re-refined oil, and bio-based binders that grow to cover more of the demand over time. Essential-use at the end of the decade therefore means aviation, shipping, and military fuel, plus this material base of feedstock, asphalt, and lubricants, not zero.

What this delivers: Active commodity market stabilization that prevents price spikes during the transition. Priority fuel allocation for sectors that genuinely cannot electrify yet.

Presidential Leadership

During the campaign, the president will go directly to coal country, the oil patch, and the Gulf Coast and make an offer: every fossil fuel worker gets a guaranteed job at equal pay, every contaminated site gets cleaned up, and every community gets rebuilt. In exchange, the industry participates in an orderly transition managed by the federal government. Companies that cooperate get the full weight of the RFC behind them. A company that walks away from a stranding asset will see it acquired at fair market value and wound down without them.

During the transition, the president-elect's team will draft the legislation for the RFC Transition Division, the RFC Fossil Fuel Team authorization, the pay parity guarantee, and the national well-plugging sprint. The team will name the RFC Transition Division director and the head of the RFC Fossil Fuel Team. The president-elect will negotiate the transition framework directly with organized labor, and brief state officials in fossil fuel regions on the governance demonstrations. The president-elect will convene the nation's fossil fuel CEOs, labor leaders, and community representatives. The message: this industry is winding down. Partner with the federal government and your workers get the best deal in American industrial history. The transition is going to happen. Cooperation is the difference between leading it and being carried by it.

On Day One, the president will sign a set of executive orders that launch everything the office can already do without a new law. The government will order the first national count of the country's abandoned wells. It will enroll the first laid-off workers in the pay guarantee. It will open Co-Investor financing to companies ready to cooperate. It will begin retiring federal coal leases on a schedule. And it will name the first regions where the coordinated wind-down will be demonstrated. What the president will not do on Day One is claim the power to take assets by decree. That power will wait for the Transition Division charter, because reaching for it early is exactly the overreach a court would throw out.

The full legislative package will go to Congress in the first 100 days: the RFC Transition Division charter with BRAC-style independent commission structure, the RFC Fossil Fuel Team statutory authorization, the pay parity guarantee codified into statute, the well-plugging sprint funded and operational, and the community resilience framework with formula-based CDFI capitalization in fossil fuel regions.

Throughout the transition decade, the president will use the bully pulpit to frame price stability as a matter of national defense. Companies that cooperate with the transition and hold prices stable will be publicly recognized. Companies that exploit the managed supply decline to gouge consumers will face public naming, RFC market intervention, and regulatory scrutiny.

The last question is whether it lasts. A wind-down that runs a full decade will outlive this president, and a hostile successor might try to tear it up. So the plan is built to be hard to reverse, in three ways.

The first is legal. The charter that creates the Transition Division will come with funding locked in for years and contracts already signed, and a later Congress cannot easily undo either.

The second is physical. Once a refinery is converted or a well is plugged, it does not un-convert or un-plug itself. The energy system has simply changed shape, and the next administration will inherit the new shape.

The third is political, and it is the strongest. By the time a successor arrives, the workers who were made whole, the companies that took the Co-Investor deal and now own valuable clean assets, and the counties whose schools the Revenue Trust keeps open will all have more to lose from reversing the transition than from finishing it. They will become the constituency that defends it. That is what turns a policy into a settled fact.

What the 10-Year Mission Delivers

Governance Stood Up by Year 1 (2030)

• RFC Transition Division operational, modeled on BRAC
• First regional coal governance demonstration launched, with federal coal leases managed for orderly wind-down and the first affected workers enrolling in Workforce Mission programs
• First regional petroleum refinery system demonstration launched, with the RFC managing a regional refinery network as a coordinated system and the first facility closures sequenced against replacement supply
• RFC Fossil Fuel Team operational, with all three models (Co-Investor, Public Acquisition Backstop, GOCO) deployed on initial targets
• First cooperative companies receiving 30-year retooling loans for refinery conversions to renewable diesel and jet fuel
• Pay parity guarantee in effect for all displaced workers; Workforce Mission enrollment open and processing its first cohorts
• Well-plugging sprint underway in highest-priority regions; national well inventory commissioned
• First salt cavern conversions to hydrogen storage in progress on the Gulf Coast
• CDFIs capitalized in the first fossil fuel communities; first unrestricted local development funds deployed
• Transition Community Revenue Trust authorized and first disbursements flowing to Wyoming, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and other counties whose tax base depends on extraction
• Climate Club treaty work underway, with ISDS reform negotiations launched with major economies through the Foreign Policy track
• First federal coal lease retirements scheduled in the Powder River Basin, paired with workforce guarantee enrollment in the affected counties
• Strategic Market Participation desk active, commodity reserves established
• Pre-communication strategy deployed, with public briefings on infrastructure age, deferred maintenance, and safety plans
• Renewable diesel prioritized for emergency and vocational fleets in the first demonstration regions

Transition at Scale by Year 5 (2034)

• Governance demonstrations producing measurable results: jobs created, land remediated, community economic indicators stabilizing
• Nationwide managed decline program launched based on demonstration lessons
• Dozens of major fossil fuel companies in Co-Investor agreements; RFC retooling loans financing renewable-fuel refinery conversions across the Gulf Coast and Midwest
• Multiple GOCO facilities operational for pipeline repurposing and strategic infrastructure management
• Crude production declining on managed schedule; natural gas redirected to hard-to-abate sectors only
• 100,000+ workers transitioned through the Workforce Mission with pay parity maintained; CCC and Federal Construction Corps tracks fully operational
• Tens of thousands of orphaned wells plugged; mine land restoration producing visible results in Appalachia
• First retired coal plant sites hosting operational solar/storage installations
• Gas station conversion program reaching thousands of stations; EV charging co-located at converted sites
• CDFIs capitalized across 50+ fossil fuel communities, with unrestricted local development funds financing diversification at scale
• Fossil-fuel-dependent community tax bases stabilized by Transition Community Revenue Trust disbursements running alongside CDFI-financed local diversification
• Major federal coal leases in the Powder River Basin retired or wound down on a managed schedule with replacement revenue and replacement jobs in place
• Renewable diesel prioritized for emergency and vocational fleets nationwide
• ISDS exposure reduced through Climate Club treaty reform, with at least one major bilateral investment treaty renegotiated to carve out climate measures
• Consumer energy prices stable; no transition-attributable price spikes

The Mission Delivered by Year 10 (2039)

• U.S. fossil fuel production reduced to essential-use levels: domestic supply for hard-to-abate sectors (aviation, shipping, military, emergency vehicles, heavy vocational and agricultural equipment) plus the petrochemical feedstock base and residual treaty-bound export commitments on their own slower glide paths
• Stranded asset exposure managed through RFC restructuring; no chaotic financial collapse
• All major refineries either converted to renewable fuel production or closed on managed schedules with workforce and community protections
• Salt cavern network converted to Strategic Green Hydrogen Reserves, providing long-term clean fuel energy security
• Hundreds of thousands of orphaned wells plugged; mine land across Appalachia and the West restored to productive use in agriculture, clean energy, and recreation
• Every displaced fossil fuel worker receives pay-parity transition through the Workforce Mission; CCC and Federal Construction Corps tracks producing measurable career outcomes
• Fossil-fuel-dependent communities showing diversified tax bases and economic activity independent of extraction revenue, with the Transition Community Revenue Trust still in place as a long-term backstop for schools, hospitals, and local governments in the most isolated counties
• Gas stations nationwide converted to EV charging and community hubs
• Consumer energy prices lower than pre-transition levels due to cheaper clean energy displacing expensive fossil fuels
• The United States has demonstrated that a managed fossil fuel wind-down is possible: no energy crisis, no mass unemployment, no community abandonment, no financial panic