When we think of champions in the battle against climate change, names like Greta Thunberg, David Suzuki, and David Attenborough come to mind. But would you ever associate former US President Donald Trump with climate action? Probably not. But, his 2016 presidential campaign manager, Steve Bannon - you know the former investment banker, Hollywood executive, the guy who’s continuously being charged and convicted of crimes - well, he played a surprising role in an incredible scientific endeavour which has been aiding in climate change research for decades. You think you know someone.
The story goes back to the 1970’s at an ‘intentional community’ in New Mexico called Synergia Ranch. Whether or not it was a fancy name for a hippy cult, Synergia Ranch became a breeding ground for ideas about creating a self-contained, ecologically sustainable environment. Co-founder John Allen, an ecologist and playwright, dreamed of blending high-tech and ecological principles to create a self-sustaining wonderland.
Allen believed that the earth was already as good as dead, so he wanted to build a big ass terrarium where plants, animals and humans could thrive. But he needed cash. Heaps of it. Enter stage right, Allen’s billionaire buddy, Texas oil tycoon, Edward Bass. Bass contributed a staggering $150 million (petty cash really) and became the Chair of the Space Biosphere Ventures company which administered and managed the whole project. In 1991, Allen’s dream was realised and the construction of the Biosphere 2 was complete - biosphere 1 is Earth. Makes sense.
A 3.14-acre terrarium with 6,500 windows, reaching nearly 28 meters in height and sealed by a 500-ton welded stainless steel liner. Containing a small ocean, mangrove wetlands, tropical rainforest, Savannah grassland, and a fog desert, Biosphere 2 was the solution for the survival of humanity. The goal was to house eight "biospherians" who would live entirely within this self-contained ecosystem, growing their own food, recycling waste, and demonstrating that humans could potentially survive in space. Could they really pull this off? Or would the whole thing turn into green slime?
Well, there were a few challenges. Within two weeks, they’d broken the rules by sending one biospherian to the hospital (she chopped off her finger) and she sneakily brought back some supplies. They also tuckered into their emergency food supplies way sooner than expected and then around the 8-month mark, oxygen levels were dangerously low because of an explosion of oxygen gulping bacteria in the soil. You’d think there’d be excess CO2 because of that, but no, it chemically bonded with the concrete in the structure. You can’t make this shit up. Hummingbirds and honeybees died, crops went unpollinated, bugs attacked what remained and cockroaches reigned supreme. It was a hot mess.
Needless to say, Biosphere 2 wasn’t getting good press. Bass had already put in another $50 million into the project and needed to get the finances under control. Enter stage left, Steven Bannon, who was managing his own investment banking firm at the time. Bannon was interested in Biosphere 2’s potential and, after failed attempts to secure venture capital, Bannon proposed a bold marketing plan: sell biospheres to governments worldwide and build Biosphere 3 as a Las Vegas casino and resort. Can you imagine… gambling amongst the corpses of hummingbirds.
Anyway, Bass agreed, and the solution was to remove John Allen from control and appoint Bannon as acting CEO. But Bannon's takeover in April 1994 was nothing short of dramatic. In an audacious move, accompanied by U.S. marshals, Bannon entered Biosphere 2 and purged the entire management team just as the second team of biospherians moved in. It was a shit show. Ecologist, Abigail Alling and engineer, Mark Van Thillo, two passionate defenders of the project, were concerned about safety but were arrested after trying to break the system's safety valves and open the doors. What followed was a complex legal battle, with the jury eventually finding in favour of Alling and Van Thillo, awarding them $600,000.
The second team of biospherians tried to continue the mission, but it was cut short. In 1995, Bannon brokered a deal with Columbia University to manage Biosphere 2 and focus on using the giant terrarium for climate research instead of the original experiment. In 2003, the University of Arizona took over, and today Biosphere 2 continues its important mission as a climate research facility. Like a time machine, it allows scientists to simulate future climate scenarios and study their impact on various ecosystems. It’s bloody fantastic.
But we’re still gobsmacked that Steve Bannon was the guy who made all this happen.
previous episode mentioned:
SOURCES:
Trump’s Campaign CEO Ran a Secretive Sci-Fi Project in the Arizona Desert – Mother Jones
The Lost History of One of the World’s Strangest Science Experiments - The New York Times
Using a Closed Ecological System to Study Earth's Biosphere | BioScience | Oxford Academic Vol. 43, No. 4 (Apr., 1993), pp. 225-236 (12 pages)
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[00:00:00] Rod: They announced they were going to create a kick ass Biosphere structure, like, big, amazing kick ass. And they built it, completed in 1991. By 1993, Biosphere 2 was fucking puking cash. 150 million, long gone. He needed a fixer. So, of course, he went to Stephen Bannon.
[00:00:16] Will: No!
[00:00:18] Rod: Bannon heads to Biosphere 2 with a bunch of armed US Marshals. And they went in.
[00:00:22] Will: Are you serious?
[00:00:23] Rod: Yep. So a few days before Bannon was supposed to testify to the grand jury, the director of engineering basically stuck a tape recorder down his pants. Literally. And we're talking recording technology of the 1990s, so it would have been,
[00:00:35] Will: it's one of those big things. It's got the handle. It's the handles poking at you.
[00:00:38] Rod: Boombox. Yeah. So why are you walking like that? No reason. He talked about a moment where she'd submitted a five page complaint outlining safety problems at the site. And to that, he said, I'm going to ram it down her fucking throat. I am not about to have a 29 year old bimbo criticize the people at this place for running something. She's going to pay, she's going to pay, and when this is over, she's finished.
[00:01:08] The battle to fix climate change needs champions. We need champions to help us fix climate change. I think that's undeniable.
[00:01:14] Will: Gret Thunberg.
[00:01:15] Rod: Gret, of course. That's the first one I'd listed to. Gianluca grimalda. Yes, a man who you have already listened to. There's also what, like Michael Mann, you know, the hockey stick guy, I mean, Leo DiCaprio, David Attenborough, David Suzuki, you know, there's all these sort of semi stars. What about corporate champions? Can you think of any of them?
[00:01:31] Will: Ooh look in another era, there was someone who drove the market on electric vehicles pretty well. Not a perfect person otherwise.
[00:01:38] Rod: what about like Tim cook of Apple? Would you call him a champion?
[00:01:43] Will: He's certainly not the worst corporate CEO when it gets, but still Apple devices, Apple is a giant company. Apple uses a giant amount of energy. I am part of a consumerist world that is the problem. Is the problem. And yes, he's that there are worse people.
[00:02:02] Rod: Well, I mean, I read this I was looking at this website, watershed. com climate slash climate leads. Ameet Konkar was listed city head of sustainability for Airbnb. I mean, I'm very skeptical. I mean, the, also there's like the global sustainability manager for Spotify makes some claims. Anyway, it's hard to pick a corporate one. What about political ones?
[00:02:21] Will: Al Gore.
[00:02:22] Rod: Al Gore. How about Anne Hidalgo?
[00:02:24] Will: Anne Hidalgo. Mayor of Paris.
[00:02:26] Rod: Fuck me!
[00:02:27] Will: I know my mayors!
[00:02:28] Rod: You are a strange individual. In some ways you're an everyday dirtbag and then you come out with that. What about this guy? You've never heard of him. Antonio Guatares.
[00:02:36] Will: Yeah, I know him. He's, look he's that guy. He's that guy. Yeah. I wore the hat.
[00:02:39] Rod: UN chap. So he, you could be arguably a political climate champion. What about former us president Donald J. Trump?
[00:02:47] Will: I don't believe he is an advocate for doing stuff on climate change.
[00:02:50] Rod: What about in his orbit? His 2016 presidential campaign manager and former investment banker, Hollywood executive, and continuously being charged and convicted of crimes, stephen K. Bannon.
[00:03:02] Will: Welcome to the Wholesome Show! The podcast that would creepy hug with anyone to get deeper into the hole of science. I'm Will Grant.
[00:03:17] Rod: I can't remember who he is. I'm non creepy hugging Roderick G. Landis. The term Biosphere. So it's coined in the late 1800s, 1870s ish. Apparently by a geologist, Eduard Seuss, spelt like Dr. Seuss. It's a place on the earth's surface where life dwells, and it was reflecting the idea that life shapes and forces the way the earth happens.
[00:03:37] Will: So the place on earth where life dwells, obviously not in the core or the mantle or the magma. But, you know, the crust, a little bit into the crust and a little bit above the crust, but not much. But then saying that life shapes the planet.
[00:03:50] Rod: In fact, one definition said he talked about life shaping the geology of the earth, which I think is a big call, but that's the gist of it. 1926, so a bit later, a Russian science guy called Vladimir Vernadsky. God, it's very difficult. He published a book called the biosphere bit of a giveaway. So to him, the biosphere was a self sustaining ecological web of life that formed a skin on the planet, essentially.
[00:04:10] Will: The skin on the soup, the fly in the ointment.
[00:04:13] Rod: So these powerful images, they started talking about biospheres in the early days, early 20th century and stuff really inspired people. So ecologists went on to create these little basically terraria, you know, globes of water with algae and little invertebrates living around, you know in these closed systems.
[00:04:28] Will: That's cool. As in like sealed and
[00:04:30] Rod: yeah. Yeah. So seeing how they, yeah let's check them out. And I mean, old school terrariums terraria in theory, you could seal them off and leave them running. So the little plants would grow. The moisture would be retained, et cetera.
[00:04:40] Will: So cool. Yeah, very cool. I love it.
[00:04:43] Rod: And when I was a child, the terrarium coffee table was the thing. And I wanted one so badly. Fuck. I wanted one.
[00:04:48] Will: Mom and dad, why don't we have a coffee table?
[00:04:51] Rod: Every time we went anywhere near a store, they had, so as a standard coffee table would underneath - big ass terrarium.
[00:04:56] Will: So you tease me for knowing who the mayor of Paris is, and you're like, mum and dad, I got coffee table needs.
[00:05:03] Rod: Both of those are true. In the middle of the 20th century ish, Soviet scientists would put people in eXperimental little chambers so they breathe oxygen from algae, they'd eat hydroponic crops and they're trying to see how well maybe we could live off planet. But I reckon these, and it's fair to say from what I'm about to tell you, these projects lacked ambition. Dramatically lacked ambition.
[00:05:25] So 1984, there's a company formed or at least a company already existed called Space Biospheres Ventures. S B V space biospheres ventures. They announced they were going to create kick ass biosphere structure. Like we're talking big, amazing kick ass. They want an airtight bunch of domes, it would be entirely self contained. There'd be ecosystems within it. The inhabitants would be provided with air, water, food. It would process waste. It would do the whole schmear.
[00:05:50] Will: I love this.
[00:05:51] Rod: It's fucking crack. It's amazing. It's amazing. And it was called biosphere 2 because biosphere one is the earth. So the idea really kicked off earlier, 70s at a place called Synergia Ranch in New Mexico. It was described as an intentional community devoted to ecological sustainability. Intentional community.
[00:06:10] Will: Well, there's a growing movement of intentional communities, people choosing how you live, not just accidentally living, sort of reacting to life, the way that things happen, but saying, this is what I want. And cults are the far end of some intentional communities, but there are lighter versions where you go, you know, I'd like to live a little bit more nature or a little bit more with friends and family.
[00:06:28] Rod: Not terrible or technological or whatever it may be. Yeah. No. And this guy seem fine. Apparently the inhabitants of the ranch basically quote split their time between experimental theater, farming and furniture making,
[00:06:39] Will: you know, you have to do all three at once.
[00:06:43] Rod: Yes. You dig in a plow. You're pretending to be a tree
[00:06:47] Will: but I get it. I get it. There's no TV obviously in your intentional community that's like
[00:06:52] Rod: I don't know that. There may be.
[00:06:54] Will: No one watches TV if they're a hippie in the seventies
[00:06:56] Rod: no one said hippie. They are intentional.
[00:06:59] Will: They're an intentional community. That is hippie.
[00:07:01] Rod: Nothing about this doesn't sound hippie. You're right. You're right. They're also convinced basically that Western civilization was, I don't know, coughing up blood, dying on its own entrails.
[00:07:09] Will: Again, hippie.
[00:07:10] Rod: Yep. Very hippie. So John Allen, who was a co founder, he's an ecologist and a playwright as well. And he said, look, Western civilization, isn't simply dying. It's dead. We are probing into its ruins to take whatever is useful for the building of the new civilization to replace it. YIppee slash cult, whatever. So they planned, schemed and dreamed up plans to blend high tech and ecological principles to create a self sustaining wonderland, you know, pure controlled, clean, awesomeness, biosphere 2. Of course they needed money because you need money to build things. Particularly big ass sci fi biospheres. So John, Mr. Allen, became buddies with a Texas oil billionaire called Edward Bass. And I think he was a multi generational billionaire. Like he might've been THE Texas oil billionaire at the time. So Bass became the chief financial backer of Biosphere 2. And he also became the chair of the space by biosphere ventures company was John Bass. They basically would administer and manage the whole shebang, the whole biosphere 2 thing. Bass also fronted up 150 million
[00:08:11] Will: 150 million. Wow.
[00:08:14] Rod: This is not a modest undertaking. Like they were going for something big in here.
[00:08:17] Will: No, I get it. I get it. But also it's, that's, that's a lot to convince a philanthropist to go, all right, we're going to make something.
[00:08:24] Rod: And look, philanthropist is not what you normally strapped to the Texas oil billionaire title but anyway, so he said, sure, sure. 150 million and they built it. It exists. It exists. So it was built outside of Oracle, Arizona, about 30 miles North of Tucson. And I mean, we all know that landscape, obviously completed in 1991. Specs of this thing. So it's basically a 3. 14 acre terrarium.
[00:08:48] Will: So give me it in Australian
[00:08:50] Rod: more than 12 and a half thousand square meters of floor area. This will help six and a half thousand windows. At its highest point? It was about 28 meters high.
[00:08:57] Will: Okay. Small office block.
[00:09:00] Rod: So it was basically nearly 204 million liters of like capacity under the glass dome.
[00:09:07] Will: Okay. So who goes when they're going on the, you're looking for a house and you go on the, how many liters in this house?
[00:09:15] Rod: real estate agency. Look, yeah, I've read the, I've read the listing. How many liters would you say it is?
[00:09:19] Will: And look, if you're building a sealed terrarium, whether it matters or not, it's a thing that you kind of pay, you've got that many liters of air, whereas my house ain't so sealed my air's coming in and out.
[00:09:30] Rod: I think it matters a lot more under these circumstances. the stainless steel structure, the liner that sealed it in was 500 tons of stainless steel.
[00:09:39] Will: That's a lot of stainless steel.
[00:09:40] Rod: Yeah. And the goal was to house something like 3, 800 species of plants and animals. Like hummingbirds, lemurs, like bush babies and shit like creatures.
[00:09:51] Will: It's a fricking beautiful art project. Tell me the science in a bit, but it like just the making of this to go, okay you've all made terraria, but this is, this is the real one.
[00:10:01] Rod: Yeah. We're going for it.
[00:10:02] Will: It's better than your coffee table.
[00:10:04] Rod: Oh God. It is. And I love the scale of it. I just love the pure, like we're going to build everything and they are. So. Of course it would process waste water by pumping it through wetlands. It would, you know, recycle nutrients and it would contain a number of specific biomes, so it would have separate, I don't know, separated, but separate, a small ocean, mangrove wetlands, tropical rainforest, Savannah grassland, and a fog desert.
[00:10:28] So the plan was to put eight biospherins or biospherites into this container. Humans. To live in the entirely self contained environment, grow their own food, recycle their own waste.
[00:10:38] Will: Like, are we setting up a community here so that we can make babies and...
[00:10:41] Rod: No, they're not going that far. Procreation was not in the job description.
[00:10:45] Will: Because I think we need more than eight.
[00:10:46] Rod: Not to test it. I think your first test is not throwing 300 and make them fuck. I think it's more like, let's put a few in and see if they live.
[00:10:54] Will: Make them fuck. That was in the ethics application.
[00:10:57] Rod: Survive, breed. Yeah. So one of them Jane Poynter said at the time, a lot of scientists said it literally could not be done that the whole thing was going to turn into green slime. And you can imagine that too. And it's kind of just turned to goo and rot. September the 25th, 1991 opening night, the night before they were going to go in, the Biosphere company space, biosphere's Ventures, they had a dance party for 2000 people outside the complex.
[00:11:18] Will: Outside. Not allowed in.
[00:11:19] Rod: Not in, no. Woody Harrelson was there. Timothy Leary was there. You know, there was some wacky celebrity guests.
[00:11:24] Will: In fairness, they are two celebrity guests that makes your party good. If you've got Timothy Leary and Woody Harrelson at your party, it's a good party.
[00:11:31] Rod: So the next morning the eight biosphere ans paraded in front of, this is the quote, paraded in front of the press wearing blue jumpsuits that looked like surplus costumes from Star Trek VI, which I assume was the movie of the time.
[00:11:43] They went in, shut the airlock door, committed to stay in there, sealed off and self sufficient for two years. So basically September 93 they would, I don't know, pop the seal. Two weeks after they closed the door.
[00:11:54] Will: No, what?
[00:11:56] Rod: Jane Poynter, the one who said they probably didn't think it would work, sliced off the tip of her finger in a rice threshing machine.
[00:12:01] Will: Oh, that's not good.
[00:12:03] Rod: So the mission's doctor, who was a doctor within the eight
[00:12:05] Will: course, that's what you do because if you're out in space, you can't just be calling for help.
[00:12:09] Rod: They need a doctor. So the doctor went, look, I'll stick it back on. But then thought, ah, maybe you should go to hospital. So she got sent off to hospital. out of the dome. Two weeks in. When she came back, which apparently was only a few hours later, she surreptitiously brought extra stuff from Biosphere 2's management, like computer parts and colour film.
[00:12:26] Will: Oh, okay. Well, colour film's just to document stuff, and computer parts, obviously your Windows, your RAM, can't expect that to last for two years.
[00:12:34] Rod: Or two weeks, apparently. Months later, reporters not only learned about this delivery, but they also heard about many other deliveries.
[00:12:40] Will: Are you saying they cheated?
[00:12:41] Rod: Seeds, vitamins, mousetraps, and other supplies, sometimes twice a month.
[00:12:45] Will: No, seeds and vitamins aren't really affecting the ecosystem, and mousetraps, you know, whatever, you know, that's not affecting the ecosystem.
[00:12:50] Rod: You're on Mars, right? You're on Mars. You think, we forgot our vitamins. I'll just call in for them. And what I need is a mousetrap.
[00:12:58] Will: Dear nASA, please send mousetrap one.
[00:13:01] Rod: So very quickly they went, food's going to be a problem. So the weather was cloudy for the first few months so the crops were stunted.
[00:13:06] Will: Oh, see, it's the weather, it's the weather, you know. Exogenous, man.
[00:13:11] Rod: Exactly. And when they say on Mars, when there's a dust storm for a year, it's not our fault.
[00:13:14] Will: It's a one in 2000 year event. It's not our fault. It was cloudy. How could you predict this?
[00:13:18] Rod: Freaking weird. So the Biospherians had to break into a three month supply of food that had been secretly stored before the doors had been closed. So they had secret food supply as well.
[00:13:27] Will: Yeah, but no, but secret food supply is not. Well, secret. Yes. But I get, you know, if you're going onto a spaceship, you wouldn't expect your crops to be growing instantly. Like, I think you're on a rocket to Mars. You're like, can we harvest the potatoes today? Like when you launch, it's like
[00:13:42] Rod: I put a sandwich in my pants.
[00:13:43] Will: I think I'm eating the muesli bars for a little while until the crops grow.
[00:13:48] Rod: So somewhere between eight and 12 months, depending on the source, oxygen started disappearing, which made the inhabitants feel quote, as if they were living at 14, 000 feet. We're getting a little low on the oxygen. This is not because of leakage. This is because there had been an explosion of oxygen gulping bacteria in the soil.
[00:14:05] Will: Yeah. Well, green slime.
[00:14:06] Rod: Yeah, this gulping of oxygen by the bacteria should have led to excess CO2.
[00:14:12] Will: That's what I would have thought. I just did a quick chemistry. Too much O2, plant, cO2.
[00:14:18] Rod: So I couldn't find any though. They're like, what the fuck, where is it? And then it turned out it was, they didn't expect this chemically bonding with the concrete in the structure.
[00:14:26] Will: Oh, too much concrete.
[00:14:28] Rod: No, not necessarily too much. Just that's what it was doing. And they're like, fuck. Okay. So they didn't have any indicators saying we have excess CO2 because it was getting bonded with the structure. So great. They knew what was happening, but what do you do to fix the problem?
[00:14:40] Will: Get rid of your concrete.
[00:14:41] Rod: No. You get people from the outside from space biosphere ventures. Management team came in and pumped oxygen into the building and used a CO2 scrubber.
[00:14:49] Will: Okay. We're bending some rules again.
[00:14:51] Rod: A little bit, but they didn't tell anyone. So this is a secret, no public announcements. So they're basically sneaky scrubbers. So the truth started to come out about the cheating and the mission lost credibility. And at the same time as this is all going on, the ecosystem was, as it was put in fluxx, hummingbirds and honeybees died.
[00:15:12] Will: Oh, I was hoping hummingbirds boomed. I was hoping there was like a million hummingbirds there. It was just hummingbird crazy.
[00:15:17] Rod: We eat them, we make friends with them.
[00:15:19] Will: Yeah, exactly. I would like an ecosystem to boom with hummingbirds one day.
[00:15:22] Rod: So hummingbirds and honeybees died, crops therefore went un pollinated, worms and broad mites attack crops. Ah. And one of the quotes was cockroaches reigned. Cause they always do. The scientists of the project start getting slammed in the media. Yeah. And some of those even today still get, they get upset about this and saying it's not fair.
[00:15:39] Will: Can you, well, well, can I add to that it's not fair. I can point to ecosystems over there. They're all over the place, but making a brand new one we have no idea how complicated that is.
[00:15:48] Rod: Well, we know they find their own homeostasis, their own balance, and we can't be sure what we haven't put in there
[00:15:54] Will: but I think let them off the hook. This is an experiment and experiment number one
[00:15:59] Rod: this is exactly what, you know, Poynter the finger lady, she said, look, it's absurd the media portrayed it as a failure because it completely missed the point that it was an experiment. It's science. We're testing shit out. The goal was to discover what problems arise in a human made biosphere and learn. So others said, look, the failure was not the lack of oxygen. It was the lack of transparency. The fact they went sneaky and secret.
[00:16:19] Will: Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough.
[00:16:20] Rod: They should've just been honest. So 10 months into the mission, the project's expert advisory board, this is again, a quote, delivered a blistering report, criticizing its ill defined goals and the crew's lack of scientific expertise.
[00:16:31] Will: Yeah. And fair enough. Like ill defined goals. You can imagine one goal is we're going to succeed and another goal is we're going to find out how it fails. And they're quite different.
[00:16:40] Rod: They certainly could be, yes. And in this instance. I'm going to go with yes. So things got really touchy and in the end, the board quit on mass because of all this stuff. Also by 1993, Biosphere 2 was fucking puking cash, like the 150 million long gone. So Bass spent another 50 million on the project, but he wanted to get the finances under control. So what he needed was someone to take control, get it back on track, make everyone fly right, runs on the board, kick goals to the car park. He needed a fixer. So of course he went to Stephen Bannon.
[00:17:11] Will: No!
[00:17:14] Rod: 1993. Bannon was a manager of his own investment banking firm, Bannon and Co.
[00:17:17] Will: Of course, and Co. Anyone who will hang out with me.
[00:17:20] Rod: Me and other, based in Beverly Hills, naturally. He specialized in takeovers. He said Biosphere 2's managers were, this is a quote, resisting financial discipline. He reckoned it would run a 16 to 20 million deficit just in 1993. So Bannon also with his assistant was Bass the billionaires banker, Martin Bowen, they went to New York. They went to talk to investment banks. They're looking for venture capital, not a lot of interest. So he went, I've got a better idea. I've got a marketing plan. We'll sell biospheres to governments around the world. We'll build biosphere three and it will be like a Las Vegas casino and resort biosphere three. Gambling within the biosphere amongst the corpses of hummingbirds
[00:18:04] Will: Cockroaches everywhere, corpses of hummingbirds, I want to play some blackjack,
[00:18:10] Rod: Fucking genius. So that was the next set up. Not a lot of interest.
[00:18:13] Will: Weird. Weird.
[00:18:14] Rod: So in a book about the biosphere author called Rebecca Reider dreaming the biosphere, The people at Biosphere just treated huge amounts of money like it was petty cash, according to Steve Bannon. Millions as petty cash.
[00:18:27] Will: I can just imagine that money would just fall out of your hands in a project like this. It is so complicated.
[00:18:34] Rod: Particularly though, when you're, like, you're a science y or a dreamer person and you've just been handed... Hundreds of millions. It'd be easy to just kind of not think about it. Bass of course agreed, this is a problem. So the solution they came up with was take control of biosphere 2 from John Allen and drop Bannon in as acting CEO.
[00:18:52] Will: Oh my God.
[00:18:53] Rod: So, back at the time, Bannon, he wasn't, you know, like the gag inducing, helmetless, Darth Vader looking, double shirt wearing, monstrous beast.
[00:19:00] Will: He doesn't look like Darth vader. He looks like Darth Vader who's been on a yacht.
[00:19:03] Rod: He looks like Darth Vader with the helmet off in Return of the Jedi. Who's been on a yacht! Before he became attached to Trump, he looked very different. He was positively lean, like he was sporty. He looked almost dapper. And he also expressed what I would call, for him, an unexpected view of climate change and climate science.
[00:19:18] Will: In what way?
[00:19:19] Rod: So I did an interview on C SPAN, 95, and these are some quotes, 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 a hundred years is exactly what biosphere two's atmosphere is now. So I was like, this may be predictive.
[00:19:36] We have extraordinarily high CO2. We have a very high nitrous oxide. We have high methane and we have lower oxygen content. So he's telling people in this and he's not, he's just saying, this is what's going on. So the power of this place is allowing those scientists who are really involved in the study of global change and which in the outside world or biosphere one really have to work with just computer simulations, but this basically they can actually check it out. And he's talking this up. Like he's saying, this is really good because we can do this stuff. So under his management, the focus of biosphere two turned into instead of being this hermetically sealed, you know, weird science experiment for people, it became a place for planetary and climate science research.
[00:20:17] Will: That's awesome.
[00:20:18] Rod: Under Steve Bannon. This is not what I would have expected from more recent Steve Bannon. Anyway, back to the takeover, May 1994. At some point in May, the first biosphere team had moved out, but team two moved in. So at the time, Bannon purged the entire Biosphere 2 management team. Yeah, sure. So team two moves in and he goes, by the way, you're all out.
[00:20:40] Will: So management's external to the team, like management sitting on the outside, looking at the computers and the graphs and the power switches and stuff.
[00:20:46] Rod: And they're making the decisions about stuff. Like, cause this is a big outfit. Like there are a lot of people working around this campus. It's like, it was a 40 acre campus or something that, so, the deck clearing though, these management teams was a final straw for some of the other leadership people.
[00:20:59] And they said, look, we're very concerned what Bannon might do. So that was in May, 94, April the 1st, 1994, Bannon heads to Biosphere 2 with a bunch of armed us marshals and others. And they went in.
[00:21:13] Will: Are you serious?
[00:21:14] Rod: Yup. And he put his brother in charge, who was a former Navy pilot. Okay, Chris Bannon's in charge
[00:21:20] Will: on the inside or on the outside
[00:21:21] Rod: going in with the marshals, et cetera. So he was on the outside and went in. And so the quote by Chris Bannon, we had to secure the gate out front. We had to get out with the federal marshals, serve the security person at the gate. I assume serve them with notice, secure the gate.
[00:21:36] Will: how can federal marshals be, what is the crime that's been committed?
[00:21:39] Rod: Because they did the company had changed hands and they'd said, you people are now no longer representative. Like you've got to get out.
[00:21:44] Will: Sure. Sure. But why do we just get the government to do that for us?
[00:21:47] Rod: Persuasiveness. I know Bannon man. So then he said, we have to move into other critical areas that had already been defined in order to ensure the safety of security of the biosphere and its system. So protect the biosphere, protect the systems. So the Bannon boys had time to take over. They wanted to coincide with John Allen, the original Synergia guy and many of the original leadership team being away overseas. In fact, which you would, but not all of them were overseas. So two, Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo. So Abigail was an ecologist or had a master's degree in passionate defender. She was a former management. So she was really into this thing. Passionate Defender was the description and Mark Van Thillo was an engineer. So they flew to Arizona as soon as they heard the seizure was going to happen or had just happened.
[00:22:33] And they wanted to warn the Biospherians that the management team would jeopardize their safety. So Alling, the Passionate Defender, told the engineer to break the system's safety valves and open the doors. Smash the fucker, open it up.
[00:22:48] Will: So you can't just open the doors. Like, it's hard.
[00:22:51] Rod: They're serious about this spaceship, man. So then while he's doing that, she had an interview with the local paper and she compared the situation to the space shuttle challenger exploding, which was considered a little hyperbolic
[00:23:03] Will: and a little bit insensitive, a bit too soon,
[00:23:06] Rod: basically suggesting that these people could die horribly as well.
[00:23:10] Will: Well, and in fairness they possibly could, I don't know. Challenger was a giant explosion in the atmosphere.
[00:23:15] Rod: Anyway, so they did this, a few days later, they were both arrested. The detective and a County prosecutor agreed that if any charges were laid, they'd be misdemeanors. Like you'd be naughty, five bucks, smack you, whatever. But then the biosphere management, the new guys, contacted the prosecutors and said no. They've done tens of thousands of dollars worth of damage. And so they ended up being charged with three felonies, including criminal property damage. And so a grand jury was set for a few months later, a few days later, in fact, April the 21st, some of the staff who was still on the board of biosphere two, or sorry, working there, they're very loyal to the original mission, the whole Mars thing, et cetera. And they were very unhappy with Bannon, deeply suspicious and super loyal also to John Allen, the original guy.
[00:23:59] So a few days before Bannon was supposed to testify to the grand jury, the director of engineering basically stuck a tape recorder down his pants, literally, and in his undies. And we're talking recording technology the 1990s. So it would have been
[00:24:11] Will: yeah, it's one of those big things. It's got the handle
[00:24:14] Rod: boombox. Yeah. So why are you walking like that? No reason. So he wanted us in to go and have a chat with Steve Bannon and some of the choice snippets from the chat. When Bannon is talking about John Allen, the big guy, Johnny thought they got a rough lesson on April the 1st and they did. And you tell Johnny who delivered that lesson, I delivered it. Okay. I'm the man. Fucking sorted Johnny out. On Alling, the woman who encouraged the engineer to break the seal, et cetera and talking about his upcoming testimony, he said, Oh fucking April the 1st, I kicked Allen's ass and now I'm going to kick her ass on Thursday. Steve's coming back. This is the Steve we know and love.
[00:24:50] Bannon was also wildly pissed off with Alling's attitude in general and her challenger comments. So he talked about a moment where she'd submitted a five page complaint outlining safety problems at the site. And to that, he said, I'm going to ram it down her fucking throat. She thinks she is a goddess. She thinks she's above us all. She thinks she has transformed to something that we are not worthy of. Well, you know what? I don't buy that. I think she's a self centered, deluded young woman, and she's about to get a reality check and I'm going to deliver it to her.
[00:25:19] Will: Self centered, deluded. Weird.
[00:25:21] Rod: I am not about to have a 29 year old bimbo criticize the people at this place for running something. She's going to pay. She's going to pay. And when this is over, she's finished.
[00:25:31] Will: Seriously. These people are really like, why do they get so angry about this?
[00:25:35] Rod: Passionate. The story got a little muddled, but the bottom line, it seems to be here what happened was in the wake of the felony case, Alling and Van Thillo, they filed a civil suit against space biosphere ventures for a breach of contract.
[00:25:48] Then of course the company counter sues. So there's all these civil lawsuits going on. They were consolidated, put together. The criminal case about their damages was for some reason dropped. And it goes to trial in 1996, but apparently at one point there's a pre trial interview and Bannon's told act like you're under oath. Assume you're under oath. And he denied saying anything about Alling at all because he didn't know he was being recorded. But then he gets to trial and it seems like he confessed some of the things he said, which pissed the jury off. So they found in favor of Alling and Van Thillo, so Space Ventures had to pay them 600, 000. But they had to pay 40, 000 in damages to the company. So what did this all mean for Biosphere 2?
[00:26:27] Will: It's still going really well and the hummingbirds have come back?
[00:26:30] Rod: It is still going. But the the second team, they tried to continue the mission, but it was cut short five, seven months, maybe, and they were out. November of 95 Bannon goes in and brokers a deal with Columbia uni to manage the biosphere to project.
[00:26:42] So his tenure ended after about two years, just over two years. So he brokers the deal and he's gone. So Columbia research is where this is awesome. We have a mini world. We can tweak CO2. And remember it has all these biomes as well. It has these sub areas
[00:26:55] Will: and you can imagine you invest a whole bunch of money and things don't, things go complicated for a while because the whole point, it takes a while to settle down. I think it's complicated both internally in the ecosystem, but complicated in terms of the governance as well.
[00:27:08] Rod: But Bannon brokered it, which I still find fascinating. And then so Columbia ran until 2003 and then the university of Arizona took over. 2011, Bass officially donated the Biosphere to them. It's yours. And also here's 20 million
[00:27:22] Will: oh, that's fair enough. That's nice.
[00:27:23] Rod: So in 2021, scientific American describes walking into the biosphere, opening the door to a glass pyramid, a visitor steps from the arid heat of Arizona into a coastal fog desert that stretches towards a savannah. A Lilliputian ocean laps against a rocky shore. A passageway leads to a steamy rainforest where vine neckless trees tower over 90 feet high. That's 4, 000 meters.
[00:27:46] Will: I try, listener. I try to give you conversions.
[00:27:48] Rod: And so do I. I do, but they're not good. Here in Biosphere 2, the world's largest controlled environment dedicated to climate research, scientists can tinker with scaled down ecosystems by switching off sprinklers.
[00:27:59] Will: Are they allowed to?
[00:28:00] Rod: Yeah. Yeah. Tinker.
[00:28:02] Will: Turn off hummingbirds.
[00:28:03] Rod: Crank up the thermostat.
[00:28:04] Will: Turn up hummingbirds. Yeah. Turn down cockroaches.
[00:28:07] Rod: Yeah. Like it's a giant Sim City kind of thing. Turn off the mice. I've fucked too many hummingbirds. So the question is, was it a failure? Well, according to original intentions, probably kind of, but to be fair for two years ish, people grew all the foods and stuff and they kind of lived.
[00:28:24] Will: Okay.
[00:28:24] Rod: Yeah, they did okay. Except for the finger being sliced off, there wasn't really a big health issue that happened. The water was fine. They could drink it without getting poisoned. A few species went extinct, but the system stayed alive. It did not turn into slime.
[00:28:37] Will: No, that's pretty good.
[00:28:38] Rod: It's not bad at all.
[00:28:39] Will: Like, like a few species went extinct. And the water was drinkable. There are plenty of cities that are a lot more fucked up than that.
[00:28:46] Rod: So they did all right. And now what about now? It's still running. So back to the scientific American from 2021, in its half acre rainforest, scientists are probing how tropical ecosystems might weather late 21st century heat and drought. So they're doing a test on that. Turn up the heat. Soon they hope to experiment with radical coral reef restoration methods.
[00:29:06] Will: Yeah, throw some coral in there.
[00:29:07] Rod: Yeah. It's a million gallon ocean and a gallon is about, I think it's about four liters, isn't it? Three, four liters? I did a conversion, the current director, at least the director in 2021, he says he sees it as effectively like a time machine that can preview a climate altered earth, which is fucking fabulous. And there's also talk at least last year of going back to the original dream of using it to simulate life on an otherwise dead planet. So going back a little bit to that Mars related stuff
[00:29:31] And of course, what happened to Steve Bannon? Well, he went from vigorously promoting Biosphere 2. Then he went to running Breitbart news. And of course, as we know, at least maybe someone listening who doesn't know anything about it. One quote about Breitbart news is has an antagonistic approach towards the topic of climate change and claims the earth is actually cooling. So he changed. Then of course he took a leave of absence to run Trump's presidential successful presidential campaign. And finally, his current hobby, of course, is, you know, being arrested, being prosecuted, being convicted and or currently he's still under investigation. He's still going through legal stuff right now, but I guess what I love most is Steve fucking Bannon was instrumental in this device, in this gigantic possible experiment for climate stuff. He was instrumental in this happening, or at least continuing.
[00:30:23] Will: People turn up. You know, it's so weird. You know, there's, what, 8 billion people on the planet? When it comes down to it, there's not that many people. People, like, they turn up all over the place. All over the place.
[00:30:32] Rod: Yeah. I just wonder if he's, I assume he's just a raw opportunist and doesn't care. And he's, we know we've seen interviews later. He's like, I just want to burn shit down. I don't care. But yeah, it wasn't just like he happened to manage it for a while. He actually, like he negotiated the deal with the universe and take it over.
[00:30:47] Will: Look, that seems to have made a difference. Columbia ran it for how many, 20 years or whatever?
[00:30:52] Rod: A few years. And then Arizona now still run it.
[00:30:54] Will: Yeah. But it kept it alive and I think, you know, you know, inside there's an ecosystem challenge and you're governing the ecosystem. You're turning it up, turning it down, adding hummingbirds, whatever. But on the outside there's a governance challenge as well.
[00:31:06] How do you make this thing? It's going to need money. It's going to need some sort of input. It's going to need people. It's going to need whatever it is. And Yes, it'd be awesome to get to a place where it's fully functioning and the scientists inside, you know, they can make enough food and they can make enough science to to make it fully functioning, but to expect that to happen instantly, wild. You know, I think he kept it going.
[00:31:27] Rod: I know. And I just, I'm confused about having to say, well done Steve.
[00:31:32] Will: No, look, I look, I gotta say, you know, I was teasing Texas oil billionaire guy, but a visionary investment in a piece of science equipment that can only happen if someone's like, no, I'm going to invest a lot of, you know, it's like the large pieces of science investment, like the large Hadron Collider or something like that. They take a lot of money, but to do something about ecosystems, that's, it's a really cool idea. And I get there is a little bit of the escapist sort of, what if we live on Mars. But it's also understanding the world. That's awesome.
[00:32:01] Rod: Oh, it's cool as hell. Thank you, Steve Bannon. I'll never say that again.
