<
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/04/the-white-house-effect-netflix-documentary-climate>
"In 1988, the United States entered into its worst drought since the Dust Bowl.
Crops withered in fields nationwide, part of an estimated $60bn in damage
($160bn in 2025). Dust storms swept the midwest and northern Great Plains.
Cities instituted water restrictions. That summer, unrelentingly hot
temperatures killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and Yellowstone national
park suffered the worst wildfire in its history.
Amid the disaster, George HW Bush, then Ronald Reagan’s vice-president, met
with farmers in Michigan reeling from crop losses. Bush, the Republican
candidate for president, consoled them: if elected, he would be the
environmental president. He acknowledged the reality of intensifying heatwaves
– the “greenhouse effect”, to use the scientific parlance of the day – with
blunt clarity: the burning of fossil fuels contributed excess carbon dioxide to
the atmosphere, leading to global warming. But though the scale of the problem
could seem “impossible”, he assured the farmers that “those who think we’re
powerless to do anything about this greenhouse effect are forgetting about the
White House Effect” – the impact of sound environmental policy for the leading
consumer of fossil fuels. Curbing emissions, he said, was “the common agenda of
the future”.
That clip – startling to anyone even glancingly familiar with Republican
orthodoxy in the years since – appears early in
The White House Effect, a new
all-archival documentary that examines the evolution of the climate crisis from
non-partisan reality to divisive political issue. The 96-minute film, now
available on Netflix, takes its name from Bush’s unfulfilled guarantee of
environmental action during his four years as president, a pivotal missed
opportunity – if not, as the film implicitly argues, the pivotal missed
opportunity – for bipartisan US leadership on the climate crisis. “There was
this moment in time when the science was widely accepted, when the public was
all about tackling this,” co-director Pedro Kos told the
Guardian. “It was a
mom and pop issue, as American as apple pie. Flash forward to four years later,
and you have a completely split electorate. How do we get there?”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
