"The White House Effect" Effect
A bold new documentary recounts an early case of modern disinformation.
Show of hands: Who here remembers a time when climate change wasn’t an issue on which the American right wing had dug into an unyielding anti-scientific stance? A time when we could (mostly) all agree that destroying the planet was a bad idea?
For those of you too young to recall that, or incapable of imagining it, I assure you that there was such a time, back in the days when MTV still played music, when VCRs were a thing, and when having once smoked a joint could destroy a politician’s career.
The White House Effect is a new feature documentary from directors Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, and Jon Shenk that revisits the early years of the climate emergency, during the George H.W. Bush administration, when there was still a chance for the federal government to take decisive action to fix matters before it was too late. The title is taken from a quip by Bush (or at least one of his speechwriters) referring to the power of the US presidency to counter “the greenhouse effect,” the warming of the planet as a result of carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere—principally, because of the burning of fossil fuels. The film had its world premiere at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival this past September and will begin streaming on Netflix on October 31, Halloween. Apropos for a story as scary as this one.
But in addition to being a remarkable record of that criminally squandered opportunity, The White House Effect is also an eyepopping reminder of a more innocent time in US politics, when the disinformation that is now endemic in American life was relatively new and unknown. In that regard, the film is not just scary, but tremendously sad and tremendously instructive.
CINÉMA VÉRITÉ WHEN VÉRITÉ IS UNDER ATTACK
The White House Effect is particularly remarkable in that it’s constructed completely from archival footage, with no new interviews or voiceovers or other material: what the filmmakers have dubbed “archival vérité.”
“We had this idea to try not to ever pick up a camera or a microphone because we wanted to make a kind of ‘anti-climate climate film,’” Shenk told me. “Not an anti-climate change film, but a film that would be very different from other climate change films, including the ones we had made ourselves.” (In that regard, the film’s own carbon footprint is fittingly minuscule, in terms of physical production.)
Cohen and Shenk indeed have a stellar track record when it comes to cinematic treatments of the climate crisis, as the filmmakers behind An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017), which they directed, and which was the follow-up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth (2006), by Davis Guggenheim, as well as The Island President (2011), directed by Shenk and produced by Cohen and Richard Berge, about Mohammed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives, and his efforts to keep his tiny Pacific Rim country from literally sinking into the sea due to rising ocean levels. (Full disclosure: Bonni and Jon are old friends and classmates of my wife Ferne and mine. In fact, Ferne is the one who first fixed them up, decades ago, back in film school.)
The new film was inspired by “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” a 2018 piece for The New York Times Magazine by Nathaniel Rich (who served as an advisor on the documentary), later expanded into a book, published in 2020. And that “archival vérité“ approach, the filmmakers told me, was there from the very beginning.
“When we originally read Nat’s article,” Cohen said, “what sparked our interest was trying to recreate an archival story, because the way he told it just made that period of time burst to life with character and drama and narrative and form.”
“In those films you have amazing opportunities to follow heroes who’ve done incredible work,” Shenk said. “But they’re immediately seen as partisan and subject to the contemporary tribalism that we all live in on this issue. And we thought, what if we took it out of the present day and the film itself just kind of lived in the past? Maybe that could, at the margins, help suspend people’s tribalism for 90 minutes and allow them to just watch a story that took place 30 or 40 years ago.”
As such, The White House Effect is a towering achievement in editing and formalism. (The film’s editors are Kos, Daniel Claridge, and Sara Newens.) I was a documentary editor myself once upon a time—a card-carrying member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, in fact—and the art of editing is near and dear to my heart. It is, in my humble but informed opinion, the aspect of cinema that is least understood by the general public, and for my money, the most important. That is particularly so in non-fiction filmmaking, where we like to say that the editing of a documentary is like the writing of a fiction film.
Simply finding and identifying the archival footage was another massive achievement, with credit due to the film’s archival producers, Rich Remsburg, Gideon Kennedy, and Yael Chanoff.
“We were sifting through thousands of hours of footage,” said Shenk. “When you shoot a vérité film, you might shoot a ratio of 10 to 1 in our film school days, when we were shooting 16mm, and that became 100 to 1 with the rise of video, and that turned into maybe 1000 to 1 today with digital.”
“This film is like 14,000 to 1,” Cohen laughed.
That super-high ratio, and the self-imposed restrictions that forbade new interviews, narration, and other normal tools of the trade, meant that the usual, already difficult challenge of putting a documentary together was even more Herculean, requiring even more trial-and-error until the story came together.
“At one point we were telling the story of everything that had happened in climate,” Shenk said, “from the drilling of the first American oil well in 1859 to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and everything in between. And we had it cut to philharmonic versions of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. We were lost so deep in the woods and gone down so many wormholes—we might not have been able to finish if it wasn’t for the pandemic, because we were all locked in our basements.”
Ultimately, the decision to confine the story to the late ‘80s and early ‘90s—like the decision to use only archival material—was seminal. Yet to the untrained eye, how beautifully constructed The White House Effect is—and how difficult a feat that was to pull off—is seamless and invisible, which is a testament to how good it is. And the story it tells is a devastating one.
THE VOODOO OF THE GURU SUNUNU
For people of a certain age (cough cough) The White House Effect will take you back in a Proustian way, as a time capsule of that bygone, pre-Internet era. Looking back now, the politics of the late 1980s feel heartbreakingly quaint, a time when even Republican politicians acknowledged objective reality—”facts,” as they were once known—and engaged in a certain amount of civility, decorum, and…..oh, what’s the term?
Ah, I remember now: basic human decency.
Some of them, anyway.
This is not to romanticize matters or candycoat the horrific damage done by right wingers over the years, from McCarthyism through Nixon and into the Reagan era, of which Bush 41 was an undeniable part. But it was simply a different time: pre-Gingrich, pre-Fox, and prefiguring Trump, when sanity still prevailed, somewhat, even if American “conservatism” was already well on its way down a path that would render that term a howling misnomer.
Today, it’s all but forgotten that George Herbert Walker Bush entered office claiming to be “the environmentalist president.” From our current perspective, that sounds like a bitter joke, but in 1988, it was taken seriously by the American people. At the time, leading climate scientists believed that there was a real possibility that the federal government could bring about significant policy changes that would help avert the crisis. For one thing, the damage to the planet was not nearly as advanced. For another, climate had not yet become a hyperpartisan topic on the order of guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights, or other wedge issues that the right wing would soon exploit with outrageous ruthlessness and deceit, including the creation of a litmus test for aspiring Republican politicians at all levels, and the fomenting of terrible divisiveness in the American body politic.
The chief protagonist of The White House Effect is Bush’s EPA Director Bill Reilly, a Yale and Harvard-educated lawyer who had previously been the president of the World Wildlife Fund. Reilly presents as a tragic hero who attempted to navigate those treacherous political waters and take substantive action to stop global warming, but was stymied by the greed of the fossil fuel industry and its handmaidens in the GOP. If the film has a villain—and it does—it’s Bush’s chief of staff John Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire and a smug bully who bulldozed over his own president and thwarted Reilly with visible glee.
(It’s no coincidence that Sununu is the father of Chris Sununu, also a former governor of New Hampshire and an odious figure in his father’s mold, who would like us to believe that he is a reasonable Republican and not a supporter of Donald Trump, even though he has done plenty to enable him, including voting for him twice and providing him cover in the mainstream media. I guess the rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the rancid tree.)
But the “environmental present” boast wasn’t just shtick—at first. In the film, audiences can see with their own eyes Bush’s openness on the climate issue. (And he was an oil man!) But Sununu, in coordination with companies like Exxon, simply shut it down, which the film shows in never-before-seen memos between oil executives and the White House chief of staff, and inter-office memos between Sununu and Bush in which the former openly bullies the President. “It really became clear that Sununu was running the show there,” Shenk told me. “Bill Reilly said to me, ‘When I saw those memos, it actually shocked me how Sununu was speaking to Bush’.”
Sununu’s efforts had the effect of neutralizing Reilly and obliterating any chance that the US government would act on climate change. As Variety wrote in its rave review of the film:
As Bush and Sununu blandly deny any shift, Reilly begins to look like a “dead man walking,” forced to make unconvincing excuses for the administration at international summits where the US becomes the biggest—and sometimes only—refusenik amongst nations willing to commit to CO2 reduction mandates. The white noise of obfuscation (who can really say when this alleged “crisis” will hit?), misdirection (claims that green policies are “anti-growth, anti-jobs, anti-America”) and outright disinformation (“humans are not causing global warming”) create sufficient cover for an about-face in which the whole issue gets “moved from the scientific to the political realm,” as Al Gore put it as early as 1984.
“It was really stark to me, when I first saw those memos,” Cohen told me, “where you could read Bush’s openness to acting on climate. That was the moment I felt so sick, because we didn’t know that before.”
FAKE NEWS WHEN IT WAS STILL NEW (AND VERY FAKE)
As a record of the terrible trajectory of the climate emergency, The White House Effect does a great public service. But even if it were about widgets, the film does another public service as an early case study in the kind of disinformation with which we as Americans are now all too familiar.
Faced with the possibility that the federal government might take serious action to reduce fossil fuel emissions, the oil companies mounted a very aggressive, strategic, well-funded propaganda campaign to counter that effort….what Variety called “the deliberately-sown beginnings of an anti-science denialism that continues to dog progress, despite all real-world evidence of escalating climate change.”
Having the White House chief of staff in its pocket helped that effort immensely, of course. But the oil industry and its surrogates didn’t necessarily have to convince people that climate change was false: they just had just plant doubt. The industry went to great lengths to create the illusion that there was a genuine debate within the scientific community over whether climate change—”global warming,” as it was called, before Frank Luntz came along—was even real. Central to this campaign was the deployment of bought-and-paid-for scientists—mercenaries, it’s fair to say—with marching orders to try to debunk alarming claims of global warming with junk science and what can only be called lies. The intent was to give the impression that while a certain number of scientists may have believed that the climate was warming, an equal number believed that it was remaining stable.
In reality, then as now, the overwhelming majority of legitimate climatologists accepted the fact that the Earth was warming at a worrying pace, that the warming was human-driven, and that it threatened the very existence of the planet. Only a handful of cranks and shills argued otherwise. But that was not the impression given to the US public by a media beholden to its own “both-sides-ist” point of view. The mainstream media—especially the Big Three TV networks that dominated broadcast news at the time—habitually put a scientist from each camp opposite one another in a split screen that implied equal credibility. Needless to say, the public was not aware that the scientists denying climate change were on the payroll of the oil companies, and apparently the broadcast networks and big newspapers didn’t bother to check, or to say so if they did.
“This is not a new thing that we’ve uncovered,” Shenk said. “Everybody knows it from The Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway. And obviously the oil industry stole a page right out of this tobacco industry’s book about how to fight the anti-smoking campaign. The tobacco industry famously dressed actors as doctors and put them on TV and showed them smoking.”
But here’s the kicker. As Cohen and Shenk told me, one of the shocking things was how easy it was for the fossil fuel companies to put out their false story and have it find purchase. Americans, then as now, were eager to believe that climate change was not real: that it was a scientific mistake, or at least an exaggeration, if not an outright hoax, as that absolved them (us) of the need to make any sacrifices or changes in our comfortable lifestyle.
Shenk: “As a woman in the film says, ‘I just don’t like to be cold in the winter.’ And we don’t. We don’t want to stop driving, or recycle, or reduce our consumption, or stop buying all the things that are petroleum products.”
And here was a seemingly credible scientist on TV telling us, “You don’t have to.”
While making An Inconvenient Sequel, Cohen and Shenk had met a Cato Institute fellow named Jerry Taylor who was one of those “experts” who went on TV to sell doubt about climate change. (Taylor appears briefly in the new film, making a snarky remark about the 1992 Rio climate conference.) “Jerry told us that when they first started working on this in 1989 or 1990, they were really scared, because it seemed like an uphill battle to fight these renowned scientists from NASA and elsewhere. But as soon as he and his colleagues started going on television, they realized it was like shooting fish in a barrel, because Americans didn’t want to believe in climate change. He said it was literally the easiest thing he ever did in his career in politics.”
So for all the genuine villainy of John Sununu and the oil industry and others who have worked to suppress the truth about the climate crisis, we the people bear a large share of the blame for going along with their scam—a point The White House Effect makes with subtlety but power. Because as I have often had reason to state over the past nine years in this Age of Trump, you can’t con a man who doesn’t want to be conned.
“It wasn’t like the oil industry had to convince people of something they didn’t already want to believe,” Cohen said. “So in the film we’re really trying to point a finger at the American people—at ourselves.”
THE AGE OF D.A.R.V.O.
As we all know, that sort of disinformation has now become ubiquitous in American life: from COVID deniers, to perpetrators of sexual assault using the DARVO defense, to a criminal demagogue who prevaricates as readily as he breathes, including spreading the Big Lie of a stolen presidential election. And we as a nation have become no better at identifying and resisting that sort of deceit. On the contrary, in some ways we seem more susceptible to it than ever, as it has become normalized.
I hope Bonni and Jon and Pedro’s film is seen by every adult American, and that every last one takes it to heart, both as a call to action for a climate emergency that has only worsened in the last 40 years, and as a reminder of how disinformation began to be a pervasive and poisonous part of our everyday lives.
Call it The White House Effect effect.
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The White House Effect premieres on Netflix on Halloween, October 31, 2025.
Photos: Top: Directors Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, and Jon Shenk. Bottom: One of the many archival images in the film, a still from an industrial film made to promote petroleum exploration, circa 1966-67.