"In the years to come, one lesson drawn from the pandemic response will inevitably be: there is no speed limit but the one we set ourselves. There must not be. Unfortunately, even as political leaders in the Global North learned a new playbook on the fly, they were reluctant to apply it to the project of decarbonization. In the midst of the pandemic response, you could have easily imagined boundless possibilities for climate action too, and there were those who saw the possibilities already in perfect alignment. We don't know what the recovery packages of Covid are going to be,' Christiana Figueres, one of the central architects of the Paris Agreement, told me in the summer of 2020. 'And honestly, the depth of decarbonization is going to largely depend on the characteristics of those recovery packages more than on anything else, because of their scale. We're already at $12 trillion; we could go up to $20 trillion over the next eighteen months. We have never seen - the world has never seen - $20 trillion go into the economy over such a short period of time. That is going to determine the logic, the structures, and certainly the carbon intensity of the global economy at least for a decade, if not more.' If we were going to be spending $20 trillion, in other words, why not spend it on climate?"