Yea, but action now has a "tragedy of the commons" aspect to it in that not acting lets you freeload off of your neighbors who do. Taking action later to deal with the damage is local expenditure of resources for local benefit.
A fair amount of the required effort is a good idea in itself, e.g. efficiency improvements in business, converting coal plants to natural gas to reduce air pollution health effects, wind is the cheapest and easist to build power source for new electricity capacity, solar correlates brilliantly with usage, electric cars/busses/taxis are great for big cities and so on.
It gets trickier later, but a lot if it just needs a tiny push in the right direction, as can be seen by the many countries around the world, already doing the "impossible" with relatively little fuss.
The bigger economic issue is that a very small number of people benefit directly from coal usage, and they can buy off politicians easily without challenge from the millions of people who suffer the ill effects indirectly through healthcare costs etc.
