We’re not solving climate change because the solutions endanger the wealth of powerful interests and because getting large groups of people to agree to do things is hard. But the overall cost of solving the problem is quite modest: a few percent of world GDP for a few decades should do it. Not small, but a much smaller effort than war mobilizations.

Meanwhile NASA costs 0.15% of US GDP. I might want to bump that up to 0.3% or so, so that we can do Mars. Much more than that and I agree that we have other priorities (like climate change).