As part of the 45th president’s agenda, construction on the environmentally unsound and invasive Dakota Access Pipeline is proceeding. The owners and inhabitants of the land construction is planned for have strong objections, but that’s okay, because the company behind the efforts is using military force to overcome those objections. Forcibly.

As you can probably tell, I have no opinion on the matter at all.

Alright, yes, I’m furious and frustrated. The pipeline — which is only being built across Sioux lands because Bismarck residents voted against it being located upstream of their water supply — had its construction permit rejected last fall by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The design called for it to run under Lake Oahe, which is both a burial site sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux and a major source of drinking water for the area. Not to mention that after the Army Corps rejected the design on grounds of safety, an independent pipeline expert conducted a further investigation and concluded that the Army’s report hadn’t been thorough enough.

This one pipeline, while a serious and definite risk, is by no means the start nor the end to the problem. An average of over 59 oil spills occur each year, and the amount of oil spilled tops 47,000 barrels, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Between July 2015 and July 2016, North Dakota alone had 1,238 reported incidents where oil or oil field wastewater spilled. So far in 2017 there have been two major pipeline oil spills, one in Iowa that spilled 140,000 gallons and one in Texas (from a pipeline owned by the same company constructing the DAPL) that spilled 600,000 gallons.

Our species-wide quest for oil is reaching new levels of dangerous. The pipeline data alone is scary enough, but add onto that the earthquakes and environmental damage caused by hydro-fracking, not to mention that the climate change caused by actually burning the oil we go to so much trouble to extract, all this could make parts of the planet literally uninhabitable by the end of the century. True, the earth’s temperature has changed before over the course of its existence, but considering where we are now and if we continue on this way — it’s like saying that your car always warms up in the summer anyways, so you shouldn’t worry about it when it’s literally on fire.

And another frustrating thing — it’s not like clean energy is an inaccessible mystery! It is, in fact, an incredible success that has been implemented all over the world. On May 8, 2016, Germany had so much sun and wind processed by their windmills and solar panels that they had to pay people to use electricity. Recently, someone figured out how to make solar panels more durable than most roofing, which could allow an entirely new kind of housing. More energy from the sun hits the Earth in a single hour than humanity uses in an entire year. Renewable resources like solar, wind, and hydro power are here. They’re available. We know how to use them. Give us five years and we’ll know how to use them even better!

Why do we cling to a dependence on a limited supply of liquefied dinosaurs when there are so many options that provide more energy at a fraction of the danger to the planet? Unless things go nuclear-war levels of horribly wrong, we’re still going to be here when the oil reserves run dry. We’re going to need alternative measures. And the time to start implementing those measures is right now — before it’s too late.

— Nina Collay is a student at Thornton Academy, Class of 2017, who can frequently be found listening to music, reading, wrestling with a heavy cello case, or poking at the keyboard of an uncooperative laptop.