While the giant desert greenhouse known as Biosphere 2 may be better remembered from being lampooned in a Pauly Shore movie, it’s a real thing. The $200 million facility was intended to represent a separate, isolated environment to test theories about how the Earth’s own systems work and consider problems that might come up in long-term spaceflight. And while the two “missions” experienced issues ranging from serious failure of environmental systems (wildly swinging percentages of CO2 killed off all the bees, but encouraged a plague of cockroaches) to escaping bio-nauts, real science was—and continues to be—done in the vast sealed space.
But for a period in the early 1990s, a Texas billionaire named Edward Bass hired future Breitbart chief and Trump campaign CEO Stephen Bannon to be the man in charge of the bubble.
Breitbart News, the media company which Bannon ran for four years before taking a leave of absence to join Trump's campaign, has adopted an antagonistic approach toward the topic of climate change, mocking climate science as "tosh" and "eco-propaganda" and claiming that the Earth is actually cooling. But Bannon sang a much different tune when he was interviewed by C-Span at Biosphere 2 in 1995.
"A lot of the scientists who are studying global change and studying the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel that the Earth's atmosphere in 100 years is what Biosphere 2's atmosphere is today," Bannon explained. "We have extraordinarily high CO2, we have very high nitrous oxide, we have high methane.”
But while Bubble-Boy Bannon may have gone through a subsequent politically expedient conversion to climate change denial, one thing about him hasn’t changed—his winning attitude toward women. He left the project under the cloud of a lawsuit two years later.
During a 1996 trial, Bannon testified that he had called one of the plaintiffs a "self-centered, deluded young woman" and a "bimbo." He also testified that when the woman submitted a five-page complaint outlining safety problems at the site, he promised to shove the complaint "down her fucking throat."
Bannon seems to have a knack for getting billionaires to put him in charge of things where the atmosphere has turned sour. Like the Biosphere. Or Trump’s campaign.
And he always makes things better … or the other thing.