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‘The White House Effect’ Review: How the U.S. Government’s Global Warming Fight Went Cold
Playing Telluride, 'The White House Effect' uses archival footage to illustrate how the U.S. government's fight against global warming became embroiled in inaction.
Engrossing as well as damning, this documentary, playing the Telluride Film Festival, is assembled entirely from archival footage by directors Bonnie Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk, who wind the clock back primarily to the first Bush presidency: a single term that began with the trumpeting of high environmentalist ideals. 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 U.S. becomes the biggest — and sometimes only — refusenik amongst nations willing to commit to CO2 reduction mandates. ), 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.
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