Crashing the Economy for Climate Change

It's interesting that people who speak against action on climate change base their rationale on the impact doing something about climate change will have on the economy, yet the US economy crashed in 2008 in ways that were far more devastating than any carbon reducing actions would have been. Our economy crashed not because we took action to stop climate change, but because there were a bunch of greedy bankers getting rich in the absence of regulations, leading to the loss of trillions from our economy.  Poof! Trillions gone in the course of a year or so. If we had instead spent these trillions on action to prevent climate change, we probably could have made our economy nearly carbon neutral.  Instead, these trillions of dollars vaporized or ended up in the hands of the super rich while the greater part of the population suffered. Not an investment in the future, but a loss we all are still feeling the effects of now, so many years later.
 

I wonder why it's so easy to say we can't take action to stop something that will clearly devastate our society, not to mention our economy, in the near future, yet we don't bat an eye at the fact that our economy crashed because of the greed of a bunch of rich people. And what's worse is that we are allowing the same system responsible for the crash to rebuild itself so that it can do the same thing in a couple decades—provided climate change hasn't done it already by then. Why not just take the chance of doing something about climate change and risk the economic collapse?  At least then the money will have been spent for some good, and not just for the benefit of a bunch of economic leeches on society.

This just in: The US has spent $3 TRILLION on the war and reconstruction in Iraq.  We have plenty of resources to destroy a country, kill hundreds of thousands of people, and rebuild it again, leaving it in worse shape than it was before, but we don't have money for dealing with climate change.  We could have probably just handed over the $3 TRILLION to the fossil fuel industry to convert them all to alternative energy industries and been done with it.  Of course, then they would have just walked off with it like the contractors in Iraq.  But really, you don't think we could have completely changed our economy around to be carbon neutral with $3 TRILLION?  Thanks politicians!