Telluride Climate Change Document

The White House EffectBonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk’s new documentary doesn’t make viewers wait long to reach its most shocking moment.

In a small press conference in August 1988, then Vice President George H. W. Bush makes a bold statement about the need to stop global warming.

“It can be done and we must do it and these issues know no ideology,” Bush says.

He goes on to note that when it comes to the greenhouse effect, those who doubt the ability to make tangible changes have forgotten one thing: the White House Effect. By this, Bush is referring to the government's ability to make policy changes to impact the public good.

Right now, if you hadn't lived through that period, you might be shocked enough to believe that, as he himself claimed, Bush would have been the “environmentalist candidate” for president.

Spoiler alert: it wasn't.

Spoiler alert: In fact, it turns out that these issues knew no ideology.

Spoiler alert: The White House effect, presented in that Bush quip as a positive, turned out to be quite negative. And in many ways, the Bush presidency was a turning point from which we have never come back.

How did we get from Bush’s 1988 statement, which came at a time when interviews with ordinary people, many of which you can see here, strongly indicated that our national consensus was in favor of “saving the planet,” to the 2024 election season, during which climate change has barely been a topic of conversation?

The White House Effect trace at least the beginning of that journey. In 96 minutes, you will be horrified and saddened. You will probably also want more information on many of the details outlined, because this project is an overview, not an in-depth thesis. It is limited, but it is compelling.

The film is composed entirely of archival footage, a non-fiction subgenre I tend to associate with Brett Morgen. 30 for 30 registration June 17, 1994 (even though it doesn't deserve a “created by” credit.) That means no new interviews with those involved, no outside expert commentary, no distance.

It's a format that keeps us in a perpetual present, or at least it usually does. The White House Effect plays unusually fast and loose with its chronology, starting in 1988 before taking us back to Jimmy Carter's 1977 “sorry speech” speech about the growing energy crisis, and then pushing forward through the Bush administration. I didn't like the time-jumping. June 17, 1994 It's great because it details a single day and all the events Morgen mentions are covered in depth. The White House Effect It also works better when it is more concentrated.

The meat of The White House Effect focuses on the clash between William Reilly, the real environmentalist chosen by Bush to run the EPA, and John Sununu, Bush's chief of staff and ardent opponent of everything Reilly tried to represent. How did two people in unelected positions manage to have such a disproportionate effect on the future of the planet? Well, that's the documentary.

Most of the crucial conversations and debates that changed the course of the story took place behind closed doors. There is not a second of footage of Reilly and Sununu in a room swearing at each other while Bush nods submissively. What we get instead are ripples: Bush’s mercurial rhetoric, media coverage of environmental conferences the United States balked at attending, snippets of unreleased memos. The filmmakers took on an incredibly difficult task and executed it well, understanding those obstacles.

The White House Effect offers us heroes, like environmental scientist Stephen Schneider and a young, struggling Al Gore, and villains, like Sununu making one of the greatest power grabs in history. Reilly falls somewhere in the middle, as a man who thought he could change things from within and instead apparently failed horribly. The fact that we have to read his body language at press conferences and in snippets of sanitized interviews is a challenge for documentary filmmakers and for history.

The filmmakers cheat a bit. Ariel Marx's score guides our emotions in some circumstances where the events on screen could be a bit opaque. I'm fine with that. I'm a little more disapproving of the use of recent retrospective interviews with several key figures. Maybe I'm a purist, but once you go to a 2019 interview with Reilly or end-of-life interviews with Schneider, you might as well use talking heads and narration. Other viewers will enjoy the reflection.

I also wondered about some of the details the film elides. This was the same time that the ozone layer was another major priority in the environmental debate. How and why were political solutions able to produce tangible results on one side of this battle (no one talks much about acid rain anymore), while the goals outlined in the documentary mobilized the likes of Rush Limbaugh and turned environmentalism into another piece of the culture wars? I guess I can understand why a 90-minute film would avoid the complication, but that doesn’t stop me from longing for the 10-part series that embraced it.

The White House Effect It is enlightening as a starting point to ask “How did we get here?”, without eliminating the desire and need to see more light on a topic that today seems to be too often overshadowed.