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IDFA: The White House Effect

Director
Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, Jon Shenk
Runtime
97′
Country
United States
Language
English

A film made up of archive footage about how the US has handled climate issues since the 1970s. The fossil fuel lobby has turned the broad consensus on the need for intervention into a political battleground.

The climate crisis didn’t come out of the blue. In The White House Effect, made up entirely of archive footage (TV news, memoranda, statistics, corporate documents, presidential speeches), we see that scientists were already warning about what was named “the greenhouse effect” in the 1970s. Both Democratic President Jimmy Carter and later Republican President George H.W. Bush put the climate problem high on the agenda. “These topics have no ideology,” George Bush Senior stressed in 1988.

But fossil fuel giants were not amused by his announcement that he wanted to be “a good president for the environment.” With a PR campaign, they sowed doubts about the climate predictions. They claimed global heating was an unproven theory. The campaign also convinced Americans that “eco-imperialists” wanted to take away their cars.Public opinion in the United States changed and the Bush administration abandoned its climate ambitions. Consensus on the climate issue disappeared and the Republicans turned it into an ideological battleground. The result was a paralyzing stalemate that continues to this day.

IDFA x De Balie

The best of IDFA selected by De Balie from November 14 till 24

The best of IDFA selected by De Balie from November 14 till 24

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