This is an IHeart podcast.

I'm Maeve Higgins and this is Solvable, interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers

working to solve the world's biggest problems.

My solvable is to balance the carbon cycle and fight climate change through incentivized

prizes and innovation. Now we told you that solvable likes to tackle the biggest problems,

and this one may even be the biggest. Climate change affects

and exacerbates many of the other complex problems humankind is grappling with. We have

heard from people working to reduce our use of fossil fuels, to prevent food waste, and to resolve

conflicts that arise from climate change related shortages.

This episode, our guest is trying to fix climate change head on.

She is Anuta Ansari, the CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, and she's an astronaut.

Throw your mind back to science class and you'll recall that carbon dioxide

enters the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels, solid waste, trees and other biological

materials. Some of that CO2 is absorbed by plants as part of the biological carbon cycle,

but we're pumping out so much of it. Those natural cycles, they can't

cope. That means there's too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases left in the atmosphere. And this

messes with the temperature here on Earth, making it hotter and making our weather cycles increasingly

extreme and unpredictable,

with knock-on effect throughout the ecosystem for all life on Earth.

The Global Carbon Project reported that carbon emissions reached an all-time high in 2018,

a terrible new record.

So we're in the middle of an extinction event.

...