I was the climate conversation changing in the wake of the COVID pandemic.

Climate One Conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge.

I'm Greg Dalton.

It's been fascinating recently to compare how people are responding to two invisible threats,

the coronavirus and carbon pollution. One threat is personal, direct, and close.

Touch an infected surface or talk too close to someone, and you could be

deathly sick in a matter of days. The other is impersonal, indirect, and far away. Driving your car

contributes in some tiny way to future melting glaciers, rising seas, and scorching heat waves.

In upcoming episodes, we're going to explore the health, economic, political, and other dimensions of these two crises.

Today we're focusing on the human and behavioral responses.

Addressing COVID-19 and climate, both require individuals to think beyond themselves.

What's expeditious for an individual to do is often just a horrible thing for the community if people do it.

Robert H. Frank is Professor of Economics at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

He's a former columnist with the New York Times and author of Under the Influence,

putting peer pressure to work. The coronavirus pandemic has changed the conversation about everything, including climate.

Even just a few weeks ago, a few months ago, you saw this extraordinary energy around climate change

that I'm worrying now has been evaporated because we've gone from an us everywhere,

forever mindset, to a me here now mindset.

Peter Atwater is adjunct economics professor at the College of William and Mary.

He studies confidence-driven decision-making and trends in his financial insights newsletter.

Our reactions to some emergencies may be as much about what we learn as how we learn about them.

We don't have a lot of people who are very prominent talking about how scary climate change is,

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