Being a college student is tough. It seems like every week is filled with five tests and way too many textbook pages to read in a 24-hour period.

We work hard, so when the weekend comes, we play even harder.

Beer pong, flip cup, kings or quarters, whatever your game of choice may be, they all have one thing in common -- beer.

It's the universal cheap college drink, accounting for most of the $5.5 billion U. S. college students spend on alcohol annually.

It's a welcomed break from the lessons and the test grades.

It's the time of the week when you can forget about all of the political banter and overly dramatic activist platforms.

But what happens when some of these platforms collide with your parties?

One of the most pressing environmental issues right now in the United States is global warming.

Global warming is caused primarily by power plant emissions, and its effects include permanent climate change, rising tides and more severe storms. Oftentimes, these problems are overlooked as focus group initiatives, and the solutions are seen as unrealistic concerns in the scope of global politics and economy.

One of the world's largest reinsurance companies, Munich Re, is predicting $300 billion losses per year beginning in the next few decades mostly due to damages from increased extreme weather conditions such as sea level rise, flooding and more severe hurricanes.

A loss that big seems extremely relevant to economic concerns.

So what does global warming have to do with Saturday nights in State College?

Most beer is made with hops, grain, water and yeast. Hops, the oh-so-important flower that makes your beer bitter, are endangered. In America, they're almost exclusively grown in the Northwest. This happens specifically in Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming will affect the northwest portion of the United States heavily. Summers will be warmer and drier, soil moisture will be lower and rainfall will increase in the fall.

This means that if drought and water shortages don't ultimately overrun hops upkeep, the costs of providing the plants with their needed 6.5 gallons of water daily will increase drastically.

The United States Department of Agriculture also warns that the trellises hops grow on could easily collapse in the fall due to increased rainfall and the weight of the ripe hops plant.

The more severe the problem of global warming becomes, the nearer we get to a rousing game of Pepsi pong.

So what can we do to save the ales? For starters, start pushing for cleaner energy alternatives such as wind and solar power.

Solar panels have no moveable parts and therefore rarely need any maintenance.

Solar energy is also completely renewable and constant during daytime hours. These are the most demanding hours for energy use.

It could play a considerable role in local energy grids to ease the stress they face as demand rapidly increases with population growth, reducing the chances of possible blackouts.

In the past, the main reason for not switching to alternative energy sources was money.

However, the cost of solar energy has already decreased by 71 percent since 1980.

In fact, solar panels and wind turbines will be the least expensive form of energy for homes across the country when banks start giving homeowners loans to buy clean energy. Right now, most banks only fund projects involving fossil fuels.

Integrating more alternative energy sources into the already existing grids would cut imports considerably and increase self-sufficiency as well, even if we only use the alternatives in addition to the fossil fuels we obtain within the United States.

The technology is readily available, there just needs to be a higher demand to switch over.

There are 1,001 reasons to be concerned about global warming, though many are foolishly disregarded as irrelevant to the immediate future of our world.

I doubt the average college student thinks about global warming on a very regular basis.

Maybe the long-reaching span of its effects will cross your mind the next time you crack open a beer.