If we give up trying to combine green with growth, I would bet the people of most countries choose growth over green.

Our current systems definitely won't fix the climate. I think I would take probably over definitely.

During times of extraordinary economic stress, the government should be acting as the employer of last resort [1] (which it's currently performing indirectly with programs such as the PPP, paying people to not work). This is likely to not be enough to bring many of the jobs back that will be lost from the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking that into account, if you're going to employ people regardless so that you don't have millions of hungry homeless citizens (which is not good, obviously), the most pressing work for them to perform would be that related to decarbonizing the economy (referring to both fossil consumption and CO2 emissions). This isn't only an environmental and climate change issue, but also a national security imperative (unless we intend to allow OPEC to dictate our economic wellbeing for another 40 years).

It's too early to tell if we can "fix" climate change (we might only mitigate the worst of it depending on the atmospheric CO2 PPM high water mark we land at) but if we're going to implement extraordinary socioeconomic policy, we should head in the right direction and adjust as needed along the way. Many can be trained to install solar panels and wind turbines, to upgrade electrical infrastructure, to install EV charging stations, or rooftop solar. These are all jobs that you cannot outsource to a developing country, jobs that have traditionally paid a reasonable wage.

We're going to spend the money we're printing [2] anyway, we might as well give success an honest shot. There are much worse ways we've spent trillions of dollars our economy has produced, or that we've borrowed from a future that couldn't consent to said borrowing [3]. We're already on the right path [4], it’s time we deliberately choose to succeed.

"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." -- JFK

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Relief

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL (St Louis Fed: Federal Reserve Total Assets)

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on... (America has spent $6.4 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a new study says)

[4] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0... (NPR: Pandemic Shutdown Is Speeding Up The Collapse Of Coal)

Who knows what's going to happen with the climate? No one, because the climate is a chaotic, non-linear, dynamic, multivariate system. Right now, as we speak deep sea thermal vents are leaking geothermal heat into the oceans. Underwater and aboveground volcanoes are erupting. One good solid eruption and you can have a whole year without a summer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer). A string of Mount Tamboras or one good super volcanic eruption could plunge the earth back into a deep glacial period for the next 100,000 years. You pair the above with the geomagnetic reversal that's going on (https://www.space.com/earth-magnetic-north-passes-prime-meri...) along with the really deep solar minimum period that's likely to dominate for the next few solar cycles (https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/04/10/experts-predict-t...)...and who knows? One thing I know is CO2 may push the temp ceiling slightly higher but it doesn't provide any kind of floor for base temperature (see Mars).