The White House Effect

The climate crisis didn’t come out of the blue. In The White House Effect, made up entirely of archive footage (TV news, memoranda, statistics, corporate documents, presidential speeches), we see that scientists were already warning about what became known as the greenhouse effect in the 1970s. Both Democratic President Jimmy Carter and later Republican President George H.W. Bush put the climate problem high on the agenda. “These topics have no ideology,” George Bush Senior stressed in 1988.

But fossil fuel giants were not amused by his announcement that he wanted to be “a good president for the environment.” With a PR campaign, they sowed doubts about the climate predictions. They claimed global heating was an unproven theory. The campaign also convinced Americans that “eco-imperialists” wanted to take away their cars.

Public opinion in the United States changed and the Bush administration abandoned its climate ambitions. Consensus on the climate issue disappeared and the Republicans turned it into an ideological battleground. The result was a paralyzing stalemate that continues to this day.