Well well well (get it?), the end has arrived, and it is paved with the haunted skeletons of America’s long-forgotten oil ambitions. Welcome to hell, population: us, and a million ghost wells from oil booms past. Let’s talk about the latest fever dream cooked up by society’s top policy necromancers: burning the remains of our fossil-fueled sins into the geothermal messiah of energy. This isn’t innovation; it’s the energy equivalent of using a haunted doll from your grandma’s attic as a Wi-Fi hotspot. Does nobody see the cosmic poetry in this? States from all colors of the electoral apocalypse—blue, red, indeterminate—are so desperate for clean energy, they’re rooting around in the oil graveyard. Imagine a boardroom full of exhausted legislators, surrounded by leaking methane and shrinking poll numbers, uttering in unison, “Why don’t we just… turn these cursed holes into saunas?” It’s so crazy it just might work. Or doom us all. Either way, the vibes are immaculate. The United States is littered with more abandoned wells than my garage is littered with failed New Year’s resolutions. These industrial relics come in two flavors: nobody-owns-this, and nobody-wants-this, festering in the ground, belching nostalgia and methane like last Thursday’s taco dinner. The cost to seal one well oscillates between the GDP of a small nation and the emotional cost of realizing you’ve seen every episode of Antiques Roadshow three times. So naturally, our response is: let’s harness their existential anguish and use them for geothermal power! Here’s the plan, best as I can decipher without a degree from a university not sponsored by a petroleum company: instead of spending infinity taxpayer dollars to plug these wells, we turn them into geothermal hot tubs—presumably for generating electricity, or perhaps for bathing the souls of corporate polluters. Scientists, sweating through their Patagonia fleeces, are desperately trying to figure out if geothermal dreams can flow through yesterday’s nightmares. Meanwhile, “startups” (read: fresh MBAs running on caffeine, PowerPoint, and unresolved paternal issues) keep telling lawmakers, “Just dig deeper! It’s clean energy if you hold your breath when you look at it!” Oklahoma, the Dubai of decaying hydrocarbon infrastructure, wants to auction off its orphaned wells like haunted collectibles on late-night infomercials: “Order now and you too can own a piece of failed industrial optimism—plus, we’ll throw in a complimentary existential crisis!” Colorado is running technical studies, which is bureaucracy speak for “We Googled it and haven’t found a reason to say no yet.” Even Alabama and North Dakota have entered the chat, because if you’re going to Frankenstein the earth’s bowels, go big or go to Canada. And thus, bipartisan unity arrives—not over healthcare or education or the heat death of the universe—but over whether it’s possible to transform a nationwide ecological oopsie into a hot new source of carbon-free power. There is consensus: geothermal is so far unscathed by the political swamp monster. That’s good for now, but you know what happens to anything too pure for Congress: it gets turned into a fundraising dinner. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Geothermal technology is the high school theater kid of renewable energies: full of raw potential, a couple of viral TikToks away from stardom, but always shoved into the background by solar and wind, waiting for its big break. Innovators from deep within the bowels of the oil industry, trained in the sacred rites of drilling and PowerPoint, are drawing up plans to inject the earth with fluids and hope hot stuff comes back up (it never does outside of midlife crisis fantasies). In conclusion, the planet is teetering at the edge of thermal entropy, and our best idea is to channel the sorrow of orphaned oil wells into enough clean energy to power the world’s last working air conditioner. As the seas rise and the deserts burn, let’s just admit it: sometimes, the only path forward is through the mistakes of the past. May we all be so lucky as to be repurposed when our time comes.