You can almost see the undergrad lying there on the sunny quad doing the math, "Um, they're saying climate change is going to hit hard in like 40 or 50 years. Aw damn, that's just when I'm going to be really hatin' the heat."
I actually suspect that within the next year we're going to start seeing a dawning movement on campuses around the world, one not unlike the South African divestment movement of the 80's. Students will come together to organize, agitate and demand that their campuses decisively act, making their schools reduce their own emissions, install energy conservation measures and solar renovations, and even pressuring them to invest percentages of their sizable endowments into funds that support alternative energy.
These won't just be the long hair kids, these will be the savvy nerds who have studied the models and know what's coming. These will also be the young entrepreneurs who want to get in on the burgeoning new alternative energy markets. They've seen the Google millionaires putting photovoltaics on the offices' campus roofs and investing in plug-in hybrids, and they know Google ain't stupid. But a number of these kids might just realize that the more a government relies on conservation and renewable energy, the less reason they have to send young troops overseas.
I'll take bets with anyone on this. The movement's coming. And alls I'm saying is it can't come a moment too soon. When you look at how low people's awareness on climate change is and you see Fox News still giving air time an absolute lunatic like James Inhofe, you realize we're probably about a generation away from being led out of this mess. So maybe it will be one of these student activists who will lead us, one of the ones we haven't heard from yet.
I just hope they get their butts up off that sunny quad and start making things happen real soon, 'cause we're running out of time.