In 1984, with the scientific consensus on the greenhouse effect established, a young Tennessee Representative, Albert Gore Jr., pondered how policymakers would react now that the debate “is moving from the scientific realm into the political realm.” Briskly told through the lens of contemporaneous media, The White House Effect is a forensic accounting of how the United States government ignored all warnings and arrived at a political consensus of cataclysmic inaction on climate change, with a particular focus on the 1980s, early 1990s, and the presidency of George H. W. Bush.