THE STORY – Tells the epic, urgent story of how we reached this moment in history. Spanning from the Industrial Revolution to the present, the film centers on three pivotal decades — the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — and the key characters who changed the world through scientific discovery, political intrigue, fossil fuel power, evolving media coverage, and emerging activism. This gripping drama plays out against the backdrop of our embattled and changing planet, providing a singular lens on humanity’s most important story.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Bonni Cohen & Jon Shenk (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 96 Minutes
In the climate change documentary “The White House Effect,” a 1970s voiceover explains global warming occurs when greenhouse gases cover the atmosphere, creating a bubble that traps heat and cooks the Earth from within. That same phenomenon traps the narrative structure of this Impact Partners film. Stuck within its own perspective, “The White House Effect” presents 90 minutes of archival footage of what appears to be a pivotal moment in human history when we could have adopted a far more sensible climate policy, devoid of any cogent explanation for why we did not do so. At least not any that will resonate with anyone outside the film’s own bubble.
Bonni Cohen, Jon Shenk, and Pedro Kos—the talented documentarians behind “Lead Me Home” (about homelessness) and “Athlete A” (about sexual assault on US Olympians)—reunite to bring “The White House Effect.” The film’s title is plucked from a remarkable speech that then-Vice President George H.W. Bush delivered during a 1988 campaign rally to a small group of supporters in Michigan. In the stump, he recognizes the urgency of what is then called the Greenhouse Effect and states defiantly that those who think nothing can be done about it are not ready for his “White House Effect.”
Considering the partisanship with which the issue of climate policy is now imbued, this is an intriguing hook. How did climate change denial become a thing? How did the issue become politicized? What changed Bush’s mind, and why? Unfortunately, “The White House Effect” provides scant answers to these fascinating questions, too lost in the twists of soundbite footage and implicit conspiracy theories about big bad oil companies and right-wing media conglomerates. Those who exist within the warm bubble of environmentalism will surely connect the dots between the tidbits the filmmakers present. But those who take the film’s paean to critical thinking at face value will be left disappointed, searching for answers.
After the early scene in Michigan, “The White House Effect” takes us further back in time to the gas shortage crisis of the late 1970s, widely understood to have doomed President Jimmy Carter’s reelection bid. Then, the United States also experienced some of the warmest summers on record. Through interview clips, you see that Americans have been concerned about climate change since at least then and—in the tried-and-true American tradition—demanded that the government do something about it.
This admittedly interesting point nevertheless betrays the weakness that pervades documentaries with too much footage and insufficient concreteness in their ideas. “The White House Effect’s” later tells you that the nation woke to the issue of climate change during the 1988 presidential campaign and the pivotal Bush administration in 1989-1993, rendering these scenes about folks in the long gas pump lines entirely superfluous.
In any event, we fast-forward through the Reagan years, when the Gipper deregulated and seemed to care little about the environment. Re-enter Bush, who starts by appointing the first environmentalist to ever lead the Environmental Protection Agency, William Reilly, but also New Hampshire Governor John Sununu as his Chief of Staff. At its core, this movie is billed as telling the inside story of the budding between these two characters, one a staunch believer in the need to save the Earth, the other an enigmatic figure who, for reasons unexplained, begins to oppose him. However, this rivalry only arrives at minute 45 of 93 and ends when Sununu departs the administration during Bush’s reelection campaign at around minute 80.
Ariel Marx’s somber score adds urgency to the proceedings, as do the perpetual red graphs growing up and to the right—more emissions, more coal mines, higher temperatures—and the stream of scenes of natural disasters, lightning, hurricanes, floods, and dead animals, all scenes of brutal, real-life carnage to make jealous the filmmakers of “Twisters” or “The Day After Tomorrow.” Things are bad, “The White House Effect” reminds us, and people did terrible things like spilling oil in Valdez, Alaska, and invading Iraq.
As the movie continues to meander through the administration, it becomes clear that the filmmakers have only come up with a surface-deep explanation of how Bush went from the pro-environment campaign speech in Michigan to the climate change denialism of the failed Paris Earth Summit in 1992. There are memos that show that Sununu met with executives from oil companies. So? Of course, he did. You would want your government to meet with all stakeholders to decide major policy issues. People with an agenda—Rush Limbaugh, the Cato Institute—paid people to say silly things and advance false science. That is bad, but it is also par for the course. What else did you expect those who had caused these problems to do? Hug the trees in the asphalt corporate parking lot? Al Gore asks lots of questions, and he even makes accusations. It is all…bad. You know it is. But you never know why.
The film’s forlorn climax—that we missed several great opportunities to make climate change a global project that we could all get behind—is compelling but may as well be an indictment of the movie itself, which also misses the opportunity to explain itself. Just why did all of this go wrong? Why did Bush change his views? We are never told. “The White House Effect” has some tangential suggestions—maybe it was because he made his buck as a “Yankee Oil Baron” in Texas. Perhaps it was his family’s interest in oil during the Gulf Crisis in 1991. Perhaps it was the flailing economy that ultimately caused his reelection. We are left to guess, and I am still unsure. Despite a significant amount of interesting footage and the undeniable urgency of the problem at the core of this film, “The White House Effect” is ultimately simply full of hot air.
