When I say American exceptionalism, I'm not talking about the attitude of "We're better than all other countries". I'm talking about the attitude of "We can accomplish whatever we set our minds to, no matter how hard the task". The same attitude was at play in the Apollo program, if we don't want to use a wartime analogy.

The problem is that while having a can't do rather than a can do attitude is "only" causing the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans right now, it is going to kill way more than that with our long-term ongoing failure to address climate change. That is where the costs of having a can't do attitude are going to be the most visible.