THE WHITE HOUSE EFFECT - Mark Reviews Movies

The White House Effect, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 30, 2025

By the time George H.W. Bush was elected President, the effects of climate change were noticeable. As odd as it may seem in today's political realm, it was uncontroversial for Bush himself to have environmentalism, including ideas about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, as a key part of his campaign platform. The title of The White House Effect, indeed, comes from a campaign speech by Bush, who notes that people might be skeptical that anything could be done about the greenhouse effect. Those doubters weren't considering what a President with a goal in mind could accomplish.

The tragedy, which we're still experiencing and seemingly too late to do anything about at this point, is that Bush himself didn't take into account that some of his political allies had a vested interest in stopping the goal of curtailing climate change dead in its tracks. This documentary—directed by the trio of Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos (who also co-edited), and Jon Shenk—draws a straight line from insiders within the Bush administration's efforts to sabotage their boss' vocal support of reducing CO2 emissions to our current climate woes.

One doesn't expect to discover that some slimy politico with just enough power would be revealed to be one of the greatest villains the planet has ever had, but that happens here. If not for the appointment of John Sununu as Bush's chief of staff, the world might have had a chance decades ago.

The film initially paints the stark and now relatively quaint picture of a years-long drought and heat wave throughout the United States from 1988 to 1990, which killed upwards of 17,000 people in the country, resulted in tens of billions of dollars in damage, and a vast impact on the agricultural economy. The cause, of course, had to do with what was more commonly known of at the time as global warming, caused by an increase in greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, in the atmosphere. Scientists had been studying the rise in that gas in the environment for at least three decades at that point, and when the drought became unavoidable evidence that something was terribly wrong, people wanted answers, solutions, and government to do something about it.

The timeline of this narrative moves back and forth a bit, mostly to provide important context. There's the start of an atmospheric measuring system in Hawaii, as well as how President Jimmy Carter was moving forward with renewable energy efforts before his successor undid much of that work. The most depressing flash-forward, though, shows how warnings from the 1980s and '90s about the effects of climate change are now so much the norm that it's just a bit of trivia at the end of each hottest year on record.

The through line, however, is the Bush presidency. The man, who made a fortune in the oil industry, surely didn't seem the type—and definitely doesn't now—who would make drastic changes to help protect the environment. Bush did seem to stand up to his campaign promise in that regard, though, when he appointed William "Bill" Reilly to the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Reilly was an environmentalist first and foremost, the head of a non-profit working in the protection of wildlife before his move to government.

Lining up with that appointment, however, was Sununu's own. The documentary is made up entirely of archival footage, from news reports to behind-the-scenes moments shot during meetings in the Oval Office. That last portion includes footage of Sununu being sworn in to his position as Bush's chief of staff, where he has a weaselly way about him—hovering near Bush's desk and trying to make his official start on the job as the top priority for that moment. First impressions are sometimes accurate, because the rest of Sununu's narrative shows him exchanging private memos with oil and other energy companies, arranging backroom meetings to undermine Reilly's work, and altering documents detailing the urgency of combating climate change to suggest it might not be that urgent.

The entire movement of climate-change denialism essentially started with Sununu in one of those secretive meetings. He gathered a handful of scientists who would counter the evidence (often with financial backing from at least one of those companies in the energy industry), came up with a media strategy that relied on right-wing radio personalities and the major news networks' tendency to push controversy and conflict over truth, and essentially put us in the position we're in today. Watching all of this unfold more than 30 years ago is to see how nothing has changed, except for the only things that matter: the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the rising average temperature around the globe, and the increase in the number and power of natural disasters.

This film is effective because it clearly presents these lines—good intentions becoming corrupted by individual actors with other motives, how certain nefarious acts and greedy plans started decades ago are still an accepted part of what shouldn't be a debate, that literal line of CO2 emissions that almost becomes horizontal the farther back one goes. The White House Effect also feels different than other documentaries on the subject of climate change. There is no call to action here, no advice for how we might change things, and no one coming forth with a way to save us. This is a reckoning for where we are now and how we got here in the first place.

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