The scene feels familiar by now: A Republican president makes a lonely stand against global climate action, warning that American jobs and prosperity cannot be sacrificed for the sake of dubious theories.
President Donald Trump delivered such a message last month to the United Nations — but now, a new documentary traces back that argument three decades earlier to one of Trump’s harshest critics on the right: President George H.W. Bush.
“The White House Effect,” which begins streaming Friday on Netflix, tracks the bitter origin of U.S climate politics to the first Bush administration, culminating in the president’s dilemma over how to position the U.S. during the U.N.’s landmark 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro.
Spoiler alert: The summit ended with the Bush administration torpedoing an international agreement to limit emissions.
But that was no foregone conclusion. The film portrays Bush as torn between the climate skepticism of his conservative chief of staff, former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, and the urgency of his EPA Administrator, William Reilly, the first professional environmentalist to lead the agency.
The film is assembled entirely from archival footage — 14,000 video clips collected from more than 100 sources, including VHS tapes stored in the New Jersey garage of a former Exxon Mobil publicist. It also draws on internal White House documents released by the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
Among those documents is a June 1991 memo outlining a confidential “Global Warming Scientific ‘Skeptics’ Meeting” convened by Sununu that included prominent climate contrarians such as Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen.
Disinformation is a key theme of the “The White House Effect,” said Bonni Cohen, one of the film’s directors.
Alongside internal fossil fuel industry documents detailing efforts to sow doubt about climate science, the film shows television news interviews of regular people beginning to repeat the industry’s lines.
But unlike Trump, who is a major source of climate disinformation, she said Bush — who died in 2018 — was more like its target.
“Here we had a Republican president, after all, who was open to speaking out on behalf of the environment,” Cohen said. “George Bush ran as an environmental candidate.”
The film begins with Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, when the then-vice president treated the environment as a popular, bipartisan issue with which he could distinguish himself from former President Ronald Reagan.
“Some say these problems are too big, that it’s impossible to solve the problem of global warming. My response is simple: It can be done, and we must do it,” Bush said at a campaign stop, before uttering the line that became the movie’s title.
“Those who think we’re powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect,” he said. “And as president, I intend to do something about it.”
The political gambit paid off. After Bush promised during a debate to be a good steward for the environment, his Democratic opponent, a visibly flummoxed Michael Dukakis, responded “I don’t know which George Bush I’m … looking at.”
After Bush’s election, events like Hurricane Hugo and the Exxon Valdez oil spill put pressure on the administration to show progress on environmental issues. At EPA, Reilly used the opportunity to raise questions about the costs of U.S. fossil fuel dependence.
But Sununu, who had angled to be Reagan’s energy secretary, outmaneuvered him. The documentary highlights memos that trace the chief of staff’s meeting with fossil fuel companies and trade associations at a time when they were pushing doubts about climate science — even as internal communications acknowledged the hazards of global warming.
While climate skeptics had a line into the White House, they also got increasing attention in newspapers and on television news, including live debates between climate scientists and their opponents.
That had an effect on Bush, the documentary suggests.
At the opening of a 1990 White House conference on the science and economics of climate change, the president used his remarks to recount a televised debate over climate science.
“One scientist argued that if we keep burning fossil fuels at today’s rate, by the end of the next century, Earth could be nine degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today. And the other scientist saw no evidence of rapid change,” Bush said.
“Two scientists, two diametrically opposed points of view,” he said. “Now, where does that leave us?”
The footage showed Sununu in the audience, smiling.
Other clips show NASA scientist James Hansen telling a Senate committee that the Bush administration had altered his written testimony to downplay climate risks. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh began targeting environmentalism as the new socialism, and speakers at the Cato Institute warned of “eco-imperialism.”
“There was a time when the misinformation, the disinformation campaign in the American media was sort of born,” Cohen said, drawing a parallel between Sununu’s tactics and Trump’s.
“I think Sununu — the likes of Sununu — made a Trump presidency possible,” she said.
‘That would have made some difference’
Reilly managed to outlast Sununu — but not Sununu’s influence.
In 1992, a year after Operation Desert Storm focused the American public’s attention on oil, Bush was facing mounting pressure to deliver on his environmental promises. A public campaign urged the president to make a strong commitment at the upcoming Rio Earth Summit.
But the economy was slowing, too. Sununu had departed the White House the prior year. But as Bush faced a difficult reelection campaign, Sununu’s view of environmental policy as economically harmful remained resonant.
“The mastery of someone like Sununu was that he planted those seeds,” Cohen said.
In the run-up to the summit, Bush waffled on whether he would attend — let alone what policy he would push.
“I feel a real obligation, part of my duty as president, to do two things,” he said. “One, formulate sound environmental policy; and then on the other hand, worry about American families, people that need jobs.”
Bush ultimately went to Rio — but not to deliver the message Reilly had lobbied for. The United States would oppose efforts to set international emissions targets.
Bush acknowledged the move rankled other countries but said, “I don’t think leadership is going along with the mob.”
“Let’s face it, there has been some criticism of the United States,” the president said. “But I must tell you, we come to Rio proud of what we’ve accomplished. It is never easy to stand alone on principle, but sometimes leadership requires that you do. And now is such a time.”
Reilly, reflecting in a 2019 interview, says in the film that the U.S. had missed an “incalculably important” opportunity — if only for U.S. climate politics.
“The advantage we might have had if President Bush had committed to seriously undertake the reduction of greenhouse gases is that we might have removed the partisan nature of the dialogue in the United States,” he said.
“A Republican president, after all — that would have made some difference. And I regret that we weren’t able to finally do that.”
