What was the impetus for making The White House Effect?
Bonnie Cohen: Jon and Pedro and I have made a lot of films about climate heroes. Those films did great work, but we were looking for subject matter in the climate space that wasn't necessarily just preaching to the choir. And we dove back into this very dramatic moment, which we learned about through a great New York Times Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich called “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” It was this four-year period in American history where all these things aligned: The climate science was in. We knew global warming existed. There was a drought in the country. The American people, from farmers to businessmen, were on alert. We had two presidential candidates, George Bush Sr. and Michael Dukakis, running as environmental candidates. Bush Sr., imagine that, running as a Republican nominee on the environment. So we were set to do the right thing. And what the film explores is how Bush had this drama unfold inside of his administration, a standoff between his chief of staff John Sununu and his EPA administrator Bill Riley, like the devil and the angel on his shoulders. And the American economy was tanking. There were issues with the oil companies. And Bush ends up turning his back on global warming. We created an all-archival film—archival verité, we call it—as an irrefutable way to look at the history.
How did you go about choosing the specific material you use in the film to tell the history?
Pedro Kos: Everything is so politicized now, we wanted to just witness what happened. Initially we had the lofty ambition to go back to when the first oil well was drilled in 1859, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and come all the way to the present. I mean, we've amassed 14,178 pieces of archival material! We dreamt very big. And what happened was that we knew we needed a focal point and we needed to home in on the why. Why the fate of the Earth became a political football. Why we became split as a society.
Jon Shenk: That story very quickly brings you into the 1960s and 1970s, when scientists started to get together to have public meetings and make presentations to the American government about their findings. That got really serious in the late ‘80s. In 1988 several scientists, including Steven Schneider, one of the heroes in our film, go to Congress and talk about the importance of paying attention to the science of global warming. And Bush comes out as the environmental candidate. In the film you see him say, “For those of you who are afraid of the greenhouse effect, you've forgotten about the White House effect, and when I become president, we're going to solve global warming, because it's not a conservative or a liberal issue, it's a common agenda of all of our futures.” When Bush appoints a genuine climate advocate to be the head of the EPA and a conservative firebrand ideologue to be his chief of staff, we have a real human drama that becomes the central drama of the film.
One of the things you do in The White House Effect? is really bring forward the very deliberate obfuscation created by the fossil fuel industry.
BC: It was [the climate scientist Steve] Schneider who said that the public has to bring pressure to bear for change to happen. And if the public is confused, they can't really effectively bring pressure to bear. So that was a very effective strategy on the part of the oil companies: Confuse everyone and the pressure won't be there. We wanted to show—through the use of television and radio, the physical dissemination of information to the American people—how the messaging started to change. All of a sudden, socialism is a word that's being used in relationship to the environment. People like Rush Limbaugh—these titans of disinformation—seize on it. For us, it was really important to show how we as Americans became culpable. We took in this information. Did we question it correctly? Were we looking at the right science? Were we listening to our politicians? Pedro and Jon and I wanted to show the way information—true or not—flows, and how the American people respond to it. The four years Bush was in office may not have been thebeginning of the disinformation movement, but it's one of the beginnings. The archival materials show these ideas taking root in the country.
The narrative voice of this film is the score by composer Ariel Marx. What drove that choice?
BC: We wanted to create moments in the film where we pull back from the nitty gritty of our lives on planet Earth and you're seeing the world from space and you're seeing scientists do their work at Mauna Loa—we wanted to create these achingly beautiful classical musicscapes. It enables you to shift perspective quickly, helps you get out of the muck and into this more ethereal, contemplative moment, which you need to be able to breathe and feel something other than utter despair and remember what we're fighting for. Our composer Ariel Marx is at the top of her game in that regard. And Ariel was also great at creating musical themes around Sununu and Riley and the political machinations of Bush. We worked with her to create these slightly off-kilter musical themes that were in the classical vernacular but also had their own character.
Now that you’ve created the film, what does it evoke in you when you watch it?
BC: I find I have a visceral response every time I watch it. We're targeting young people with this film: college age, early 20s. And when they watch it, there's a level of disbelief and outrage. And that's what we're going for. You can put a message at the end of a film, which is what we've historically done with climate change films—you know, change your light bulbs, go solar, drive electric cars. All those things are important, but for us, the creative motivator was outrage. We want the viewer to have this mic drop moment of complete outrage at the end of the film.
JS: I'm very proud of what we've done with time in the movie. We move around in it. And when I watch the movie, I lose myself in the drama each time. There's a moment in the film that I love, that Pedro was masterful at editing, where you start the Rio Conference in 1992 where Bush comes down to deliver a speech on the US position on global warming, and before we finish the conference, we zoom forward to show you the consequences of inaction, which is wildfires and floods and storms and all the stuff we're living with now. And then we zoom back and we finish the Rio conference, and each time we go back, I have this feeling like, “Oh my god, if only.” And of course, the next thought after that is, “Well, there are still decisions to be made, right? We're still living in the present tense. There's still a way that this curve [illustrating CO2 levels in the atmosphere] could go really far up or we level out and maybe even fall off. Right? The decisions that we make today, in 2024, in the present tense, are still going to determine the future.” That's our hope with the film, that people can feel this deeply and then have the realization that the actions we take now will have consequences down the road.
What else do you hope people will take from The White House Effect??
PK: I hope that audiences are engaged, transported, entertained, but that they're also jolted into a different consciousness and into asking questions. Why have we let this take so long? I think that's very important because we have to change the way we look at things before we act. One of the things that's very effective in the film I think is the way you have that very calm throughline of the number, right? The CO2 level in the atmosphere. It’s this undercurrent that's a riptide, going up. We can argue all we want, we can deny all we want, but the facts speak for themselves and we are feeling the consequences. I think our film is so effective at showing the way in which the collective will was undercut and distorted and manipulated. Absolutely and completely and very strategically, choices were made to preserve a status quo that was benefiting a very small percentage of society. Industry circled their wagons and said, “We need to change the narrative.” And they did so incredibly efficiently.
BC: This film is a Get Out the Vote film, in a way. It's really about how your vote matters. We need a president who believes the climate crisis is real. Like Biden or don't like Biden, but he effectively put in place the first and only significant climate bill—his infrastructure bill—that a president has ever put in place, putting a presidential stamp on the importance of this issue and doing that in a way that had positive economic benefits. We need the White House making the connection between good economic growth and decisions that are good for the environment, Climate change is, in my view, the only issue that matters in 2024. The science is in. It's been in for a long time. The redundancy of the message is chilling. The natural disasters have gotten much, much, much worse. This is the most serious existential moment of our human existence. So take the outrage and vote and be present in the political conversation.
Is there anything that gives you hope for the planet at this point?
BC: Technology. Jon and I spent three years making a film with Al Gore, and if you can believe it, he’s the most optimistic person about the environment you can speak to. And he knows the most. He always refers to something called his “hope bucket,” because to do the work, you have to believe that there is something to be hopeful for. And the technology is here, we've got it—all kinds of people coming up with strategies about carbon sequestering, liquefying carbon and burying it. I'm encouraged by the fact that many colleges now have environmental studies programs. There's a lot of work and research being done at the university level, we just have to seize on it. And there are things in our daily lives that are making a difference. Many more Americans have solar panels, are driving electric cars, are pulling down their fossil fuel use. We just have to go to the next chapter.