“How Did We Get Here?”: Documentary Explores How Republicans Changed Course on Climate | Documentaries

IIn 1988, the United States entered the worst drought since the Dust Bowl. Crops withered in fields across the country, part of damage estimated at $60 billion ($160 billion in 2025). Dust storms swept through the Midwest and northern Great Plains. Cities have imposed water restrictions. That summer, relentlessly high temperatures killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people, and Yellowstone National Park suffered one of the worst wildfires in its history.

In the midst of the disaster, George H. W. Bush, then Vice President of Ronald Reagan, met with farmers in Michigan who were suffering from crop losses. Bush, the Republican presidential candidate, consoled them: If elected, he will be the environment president. He acknowledged the reality of extreme heatwaves — the “greenhouse effect,” to use contemporary scientific language — quite clearly: the burning of fossil fuels had contributed to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to global warming. But although the scale of the problem may seem “impossible,” he assured farmers that “those who think we are powerless to do anything about global warming forget the White House effect” — the effect of sound environmental policy on the major consumer of fossil fuels. He said reducing emissions is “the common agenda for the future.”

That clip — which would have stunned anyone even familiar with Republican doctrine in the years since — appeared early in The White House Effect, a new archival documentary examining the evolution of the climate crisis from a nonpartisan reality to a divisive political issue. The 96-minute film, now available on Netflix, takes its name from Bush’s unfulfilled guarantee on environmental action during his four years as president, a pivotal missed opportunity — if not, as the film implicitly argues, the A pivotal missed opportunity – for bipartisan US leadership on the climate crisis. “There was a moment in time when the science was widely accepted, when the public was about tackling this,” Pedro Cos, the film’s co-director, told The Guardian. “It was a mom-and-pop issue, an issue as American as apple pie. Looking forward four years, the electorate is quite divided. How do we get there?”

The film, directed by Coss with John Shenk and Bonnie Cohen, first turns the clock back from Bush’s uncontroversial campaign promise to the 1970s, when the science of global warming became a topic of public conversation. In news footage from the late 1970s, ordinary Americans react to Jimmy Carter’s advice to confront “a problem unprecedented in our history” with patriotic enthusiasm; They stress that sacrifices may be necessary. By the early 1980s, in the face of gas shortages and hours-long lines at pumping stations, some of that enthusiasm had collapsed. As the Republican presidential nominee, Reagan responded to this discontent by blaming government and calling for the return of power to the private sector (or, to use Reagan’s euphemism, “the experts in the field”) – paving the way for the GOP’s symbiotic relationship with Big Oil, keenly aware of the impact of emissions on the climate. (In the words of an internal Exxon document from 1984: “We can either adapt our civilization to a warmer planet or avoid the problem by sharply reducing the use of fossil fuels.”)

But the film focuses largely on Bush, a blue-blooded man who made his fortune in the Texas oil fields and who nevertheless began his term in 1989 determined, at least on the surface, to break with his predecessor on the environment. Bush appointed environmental activist William Reilly as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. “The time to act is now,” he urged Congress. The White House’s influence illustrates the political forces that have eroded this purpose: companies that, according to their internal documents, sought to downplay and discredit scientific evidence to protect their profits; The power games of White House chief of staff John Sununu, an ally of corporate lobbyists who outmaneuvered Reilly by encouraging climate skepticism in the wake of disasters like Hurricane Hugo and the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill.

The film works exclusively using meticulously edited archival footage – the team sifted through more than 14,000 clips from more than 100 sources, including VHS tapes stored in the New Jersey garage of a former Exxon Mobil publicist and a memo from Sununu’s 1991 “secret scientific meeting of global warming skeptics” to enable media appearances by prominent climate dissidents. Coss said the reliance on the archive was part of an attempt to “immerse the public in a time when this was not a political football — where we experience the politicization of the issue, rather than inform it.” “When you turn on the camera and interview someone in the present, it will automatically come up with the political connotations that the present brings.”

Cohen and Schenk are veterans of climate change films. The pair directed the sequel Uncomfortable: Truth to Power, a follow-up to Al Gore’s groundbreaking documentary about the looming climate catastrophe. But with the White House’s influence, “we wanted to do something very different from what we’d done in our previous work and what we think of as the ‘climate change type’ of documentary: We just wanted to drop the historical truth bomb,” Schenk said. “We need that, don’t we? We just need the truth.”

Cohen added that with archiving, there is an “opportunity to expand the conversation.” From interviews with men on the street to the standard network radio shows of the period, “I hope you can see yourself in the film no matter who you are as an American, and feel part of the conversation, rather than some liberal filmmaker preaching to you.”

The pulpits of climate change skeptics in the mainstream media and Sununu’s advice appear to have had an impact on Bush. By 1990, while speaking at a White House conference on the climate crisis, he quibbled on what had once been established: “One scientist said that if we continue burning fossil fuels at today’s rate, by the end of the next century, the Earth could be 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is today. The other scientist said he saw no evidence of rapid change.” “Two worlds, two diametrically opposed points of view. Now, where does this lead us?” The United States has been left helpless by political division. Two years later, the “environment chief” reluctantly attended the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, a major UN conference to set international emissions-reduction targets, and called for opposition to such measures in the name of economic development and stability. The move, by the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, angered other countries, but Bush rebuked the international coalition, saying: “I don’t think the leadership is going along with the mob.” The seeds of outright denial of climate change and an unfettered and open alliance between the Republican Party and corporate interests have been sown.

Nearly three decades later, in 2019, Reilly lamented how the United States had squandered an “immeasurably important” opportunity in Rio. “The advantage we would have had if President Bush had committed to making a serious commitment to reducing greenhouse gases is that we might have eliminated the partisan nature of the dialogue in the United States,” he said. If, in an age of hyperpartisanship, increasingly ridiculous natural disasters, and the Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulation, that prospect sparks deep outrage — well, as Cohen argued, that’s the point. “Climate change movies, at least in the last 10 years, have tried to provide medicine for the climate crisis, and then have a ‘bucket of hope’ at the end, where you can feel okay,” she said. “Our mission is to create anger. We cannot be ashamed of anger. And if this film, in all its indisputable archival historical glory, can create that anger, then we have succeeded.”

She added that hope is “to feel angry, to feel intolerant of denial of the truth, and to do something about it at the ballot box. Despair is when you feel like you can’t do anything. But we have a great electorate in this country – let’s get out of there.”

Having overseen the collective archiving effort, Coss encouraged viewers to consider “the general arc of history” and—even in the face of the Los Angeles fires, the Texas floods, and the rapid and unprecedented intensification of hurricanes like the one that devastated Jamaica last week—“what good is despair?” The reality of political power, for good and evil, is “right here before our eyes.”

He added: “The choice is in our hands.” “We’ve been showing you a ‘what if’ moment since 1988. And now we’re in another ‘what if’ moment.”