‘The White House Effect’ Review: Limited but Convincing Doc Captures a Key Moment in the Climate Change Debate

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

In a small press conference in August of 1988, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush makes a bold declaration about stopping global warming.

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

He goes on to observe that when it comes to the greenhouse effect, those doubting the ability to make tangible change have forgotten about one thing: the White House Effect. By that, Bush is referring to the government’s ability to make policy changes to impact the public good. 

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In this moment, if you didn’t live through that period, you might be flummoxed enough to believe that, as he claimed himself, Bush would be the “environmental candidate” for the presidency.

Spoiler alert: He was not.

Spoiler alert: Those issues did not, in fact, turn out to know 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 represented a pivot point from which we’ve never returned.

How did we get from Bush’s 1988 pronouncement — which came at a moment when man-on-the-street interviews, many of which are seen here, strongly indicated that our national consensus was pro-“saving the planet” — to the 2024 election season, during which climate change has barely been a point of conversation?

The White House Effect traces at least the beginning of that journey. Over 96 minutes, you’ll be horrified and saddened. You’ll probably also want more information on a lot of the broadly sketched details, because this project is an overview and not an in-depth thesis. It’s limited, but it’s convincing.

The movie is composed entirely of archival footage, a nonfiction subgenre that I tend to associate with Brett Morgen’s 30 for 30 entry June 17, 1994 (even if it doesn’t deserve a “created by” credit). That means no new talking head interviews from those involved, no outside expert commentary, no distance.

It’s a format that keeps us in a perpetual present tense — or it usually is. The White House Effect plays unusually fast and loose with its timeline, starting in 1988 before taking us back to Jimmy Carter’s 1977 “unpleasant talk” address on the burgeoning energy crisis, and then pushing forward through the Bush administration. I didn’t love the hopping around in time. June 17, 1994 is great because it details a single day and all of the events that Morgen brings up are thoroughly covered. The White House Effect likewise works best when it’s most focused.

The meat of The White House Effect focuses on the clash between William Reilly, the actual environmentalist Bush tapped to run the EPA, and John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff and an ardent opponent of everything Reilly attempted to stand for. How did two people in unelected positions manage to have such an outsized effect on the future of the planet? Well, that’s the documentary.

Most of the crucial conversations and debates that turned the tide happened behind closed doors. There isn’t a second of footage that exists of Reilly and Sununu in a room swearing at each other while Bush nods submissively. What we get instead are ripples: Bush’s shifting rhetoric, news coverage of the environmental conferences the United States waffled on participating in, snippets from previously unseen memos. The directors have embarked on a hugely difficult task and they’ve executed it well, understanding those obstacles.

The White House Effect gives us heroes, like environmental scientist Stephen Schneider and a crusading young Al Gore, and villains, like Sununu making one of history’s largest power grabs. Reilly exists somewhere in the middle, as a man who believed he could change things from within and, instead, seemingly failed horribly. That we have to read his body language at press conferences and in snippets of sanitized interviews is a challenge for the documentarians and for history.

The filmmakers cheat a little. Ariel Marx’s score steers our emotions in some circumstances where the events onscreen might be a tad opaque. I’m fine with that. I’m a bit 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 late-in-life interviews with Schneider, you might as well be using talking heads and narration. Other viewers will like the reflection.

I was also left with questions about a few details that the film evades. This was the same period during which the hole in the ozone was another major priority in the environmental debate. How and why were policy solutions able to produce tangible results on one front of this battle — nobody talks much about acid rain anymore — while the objectives outlined in the documentary mobilized the likes of Rush Limbaugh and turned environmentalism into another piece of the culture wars? I guess I understand why a 90-minute movie would avoid the complication, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing for the 10-part series that embraced it.

The White House Effect is illuminating as a “How did we get here?” starting point, without eliminating the desire and need to see more light cast on a subject that feels like it’s too often being upstaged today.