‘The White House Effect’ Review: How Climate Change Became Political (Netflix)
Using archival footage, this documentary traces how U.S. leaders went from acknowledging the dangers of global warming to denying it outright. What began as a bipartisan scientific consensus turned into a political war fueled by corporate power.
Documentaries built entirely from archival footage are often the most powerful and effective of all. While their materials can be just as manipulated as those of any other format, there’s something about the raw impact of images captured as events unfold that can’t be replaced by interviews, analysis, testimonies—or, least of all, reenactments. The strength of The White House Effect lies precisely there. It’s striking, though, how rare such films are—at least within the English-language, socially or politically themed documentary market that circulates on major platforms. They’re far more common at European festivals, but not something you’d usually see as a weekly Netflix release.
The title The White House Effect can be misleading—it sounds like it might refer to current U.S. politics. In a way, it does: the climate change issues depicted here should be a top priority for the current administration, which largely ignores or denies them. But the film directed by Bonni Cohen and her team focuses primarily on the period between 1977 and 1993, when what was then known as the “greenhouse effect” first began to capture public attention in the U.S., following devastating heat waves and droughts that crippled the economy.
What the documentary sets out to show—through television reports, ads, congressional hearings, conventions, public and internal documents, and material from the White House itself—is how an issue that once united both political parties around scientific data gradually evolved into a battlefield dividing two opposing camps: those who continue to trust the science revealing the dangers of global warming, and those—backed by the oil industry—who have spent decades trying to discredit that same evidence.
The film’s central thread runs through George H. W. Bush’s presidency. Initially intent on reversing Ronald Reagan’s total disregard for environmental concerns, Bush gradually gave in to the mounting economic and political pressures that pushed him to sideline the issue—and eventually deny or downplay it altogether. Although The White House Effect focuses specifically on how the United States—the world’s largest fossil-fuel consumer—missed its chance to lead meaningful change, it also offers a broader reflection on how political narratives are constructed and spread to deny scientific facts in defense of economic interests.
The ideological rift that took shape during those years is no longer news. The rise of anti-scientific discourse and the spread of absurd conspiracy theories—especially in the age of social media and algorithmic manipulation—have become as widespread, if not more so, than empirical evidence itself. Every topic now seems to be twisted to provoke division and extremism.
Climate change denial isn’t the only issue caught in this false dichotomy—just look at the global drop in vaccination rates and its consequences—but it may be the most serious one. Because addressing it through public policy means confronting the enormous power of oil corporations, it became a political battleground. What’s fascinating about The White House Effect is that it offers a different kind of proof: the proof of the archive. Seeing early footage of Republican leaders and their scientists acknowledging the need to take climate action serves as a near-empirical—if not strictly scientific—reminder that any opinion can be reshaped when real power decides it should be.
