Worth watching - The White House Effect, a new Netflix documentary, traces the origins of modern US climate politics to President George HW Bush’s administration and the lead-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The film argues that the partisan divide on climate change, often associated with later Republican leaders such as Donald Trump, began under Bush’s presidency as he struggled to balance environmental ambition with economic concerns. Assembled entirely from 14,000 archival video clips and declassified White House documents, the documentary reveals a power struggle within Bush’s administration between EPA Administrator William Reilly, who urged decisive action on global warming, and Chief of Staff John Sununu, a climate sceptic who worked closely with fossil fuel interests. Internal memos show Sununu convening meetings with leading climate contrarians such as Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen, while the fossil fuel industry simultaneously funded public campaigns to sow doubt about the science of climate change. The resulting disinformation spread through media coverage and public discourse, influencing both policy and public opinion. Initially, Bush had positioned himself as a pro-environment candidate, pledging during his 1988 campaign to tackle global warming and invoking what he called the “White House effect”. However, after entering office, he came under mounting pressure from economic advisers and conservative allies to resist strong climate commitments. Events such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill and Hurricane Hugo had initially elevated environmental issues, but Sununu’s influence and the growing media platform for climate sceptics undermined momentum. By the time of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, Bush faced an economic downturn and political headwinds ahead of re-election. Although he attended the summit, he refused to back binding international emissions targets, framing his position as one of principle rather than obstruction. Reilly later reflected that this decision was a turning point that entrenched partisanship around climate policy in the US. A Republican president’s embrace of emissions reductions, he suggested, might have transformed the political trajectory of the issue. Instead, as the film argues, the tactics and narratives forged under Sununu’s influence helped lay the groundwork for decades of US political resistance to global climate action. (E&E News)