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If the world’s ending in 12 years, why even go to college?

Think about it

The College Fix‘s own Kyle Hooten recently attended one of the many student-heavy climate change marches that happened around the world late last week. These marches were meant to send a message to world leaders that young adults are serious about “climate justice.” One student, asked about the popular prediction that climate change will destroy humanity in around 12 years, stated with sincerity: “For [all] we know, it could be sooner than that.”

This is a common refrain among climate activists, particularly younger students in the throes of climate activism: That we have around a decade, maybe less, before climate danger pushes humanity over the brink of extinction. Here’s an honest reply to that theory: If this is accurate, why even go to college? What’s the point?

Honestly. If everything is going to be a glacial lake in less than 15 years, why pursue a degree in feminist botany studies? What good will a history minor do you if your life consists of rowing from one inundated mountaintop to the next, fighting with roving Mad Maxi-style gangs of climate survivors for the scant few cases of saltines and tins of anchovies left in the world? So you get on the Dean’s List—will that help you learn to breath underwater?

Perhaps these young scholars believe in hedging their bets—maybe they think it’s wise to get a degree in the hope that society will right its wrongs and get on a good green path before it’s too late. That, of course, is an absurd pipe dream, at least if we’re willing to take climate alarmists at their word. If the planet is truly going to reverse its carbon consumption over the next decade, we would need to see not just the United States but every major industrialized nation, including energy-ravenous countries like China, adopt absolutely dire, perhaps catastrophic energy policies, to the point that many if not most people in the developed world would have to endure significant and persistent energy shortages for years and years. Does anyone actually think this scenario will come to pass?

If alarmists are right in their dire predictions, there’s really nothing much at all to be done except accept what’s coming. In which case paying forty grand for a college education seems sort of weird, considering you’re probably just going to be dead in a few years. Why not just embrace the inevitable and stop worrying about homework? If you don’t, maybe that tells you something about how seriously you believe these doom-laden predictions about the fate of the world.

MORE: Teacher quits profession because students are in jeopardy from climate change

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