President George H. W. Bush (left) with his pro-Green adviser Bill Reilly.
Netflix
White House effect
Directed by Bonnie Cohen, Pedro Kos and John Schenk, streaming on Netflix October 31st.
Opening sequence White House effecta heartbreaking new climate documentary that takes you to… great drought of 1988. Picture the scene: A sweltering North American summer has brought the worst drought to the United States since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. There is no respite. The heat is inevitable.
These extreme conditions set the agenda for that year's presidential race between Democrat Michael Dukakis and Republican George H. W. Bush. The latter will win a landslide victory with a promising platform. greater environmental protection.
“Some people say these problems are too big,” Bush said while campaigning in Michigan, meaning climate change. “My answer is simple: it can be done, and we must do it. These problems know no ideology or political boundaries.” This is a statement from a leading Republican politician seems unthinkable today.
The USA of 1988 is not only a place where environmental interventions win the vote, but also a place where the relationship between fossil fuels and rising temperatures is reported relatively stoically, albeit with great skepticism.
Told largely from archival materials, White House effect it is an ersatz vision of a better future that never materialized. This is the story of how millions of people were willing to accept that fighting climate change was a bipartisan cause, and how they were encouraged to abandon that view.
The key battle at the heart of the film is between two of Bush's advisers. In the blue corner is Bill Reilly, the former president of the World Wildlife Fund who became head of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1989. In the red corner is John H. Sununu, Bush's chief of staff and avid climate skeptic. The dual forces driving the Bush administration's environmental policies will battle for years, with catastrophic consequences for our planet.
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Speaking about climate change, George HW Bush said that this problem knows no political boundaries.
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Looking at the world around us, it is of course no surprise which side won. But the most interesting thing about White House effect it is not a foregone conclusion; This is the specificity of slow progress towards rock. The documentary's archival footage is always breathtaking, especially when combined with frequent jumps back and forth in time that help underscore the film's argument. This keeps the viewer on the edge of their seats so that the sheer darkness of what they are seeing does not dull its edge.
For example, we recall the 1979 energy crisis, when millions of people waited for hours to fill up their cars as oil production fell while oil giant Exxon's third-quarter earnings grew by 119 percent. One motorist waiting at a gas station remarks that everyone should really go home and wait out the gas shortage. When asked why he doesn't turn back, he replies: “I don't do it because no one else does.”
There are many climate scientists featured in the documentary, but none are as prominent as Steven Schneider, who was one of the first to stick his head above the parapet and try to push for action on climate change. He serves as the film's emotional thread, from his first appearance, testifying before a U.S. Senate committee in 1988, to his last, filmed shortly before his death in 2010.
“If I go back to when I really started pushing this issue, most of my immediate goals would have failed. But here we are. We've barely made progress,” he says. “People have realized the problem [of global warming] so good now that we're on the verge of actually making cultural change, but it's moving forward [a] generational time frame.”
It's heartbreaking to imagine how Schneider would have felt about the last 15 years of wasted effort, not to mention the direction the US is heading under the current president.
I'm watching White House effect it's a suffocating experience. This will make you bitter, especially if, like me, you were born too late to witness the events first hand. And if the film is a polemic, then it is a necessary one, designed to shake us out of apathy and stagnation by any means – or necessary.
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