You phrased this wrong. It should be: when some small group of people believe that something needs to get done, do they just go out and do it, or do they try to co-opt everyone else's resources using government power?

> Slavery - Somehow, the "land of the free" was one of the last developed nations to condemn this practice.

And somehow, the "something needs to get done, so let's get it done" methodology ended up killing somewhere between half a million and a million people and leading to a century or more of Jim Crow. If that's what "getting together to get it done" looks like, I'll take bickering and in-fighting.

By contrast, countries that were willing to countenance something less than "getting it done" the abolitionist way (such as Britain, which simply bought the slaves' freedom by paying off the slave owners) ended up ending slavery with no loss of life and a much smoother social transition.

Not to mention that, if the abolitionists had simply left the South alone, they probably would have ended slavery on their own, and probably sooner than 1865. In 1831, the Virginia State Legislature was considering a bill to abolish slavery in the state, and there was a good chance it was going to pass. If it had, the other slave states would probably have followed Virginia's lead. Then word came that William Lloyd Garrison in Boston had published an abolitionist pamphlet calling for no compromise and just forcing the South to end slavery, and the bill died.

> Climate Change - There is largely universal consensus that if current trends continue, there has been and will continue to be an accelerating increase in human suffering.

A consensus that is based on flawed climate models that do not make correct predictions, and economic numbers based on no predictive power whatsoever. Consensus is worthless if there is no predictive power to back it up.

> We can accept that our scientists can predict the movements of celestial bodies across distances mind-bogglingly vast down to the minute, but trust our "guts" over them.

That's because astronomers can back up their predictions of the movements of celestial bodies with a track record of accurate predictions to many decimal places, over a period of more than a century. Whereas climate scientists, as above, can back their predictions up with--nothing.

> Some might argue that the US is rejecting a goal chosen by everyone else, and doing so as a brave stand of individualism.

Yep. If everybody else has a consensus that we should all shoot ourselves in the foot, should the US follow it?

> Do I need to go on?

No, you've given quite enough background to see where you're coming from. Hopefully I've done the same.