New Documentary Blames L.A.’s 2025 Wildfires on ‘Climate Change’ While Officials’ Failures Get a Pass

Another film has arrived to tell Angelenos that the true villain in the January 2025 wildfires was not the people who started them, the empty reservoirs that left firefighters dry, or the mayor who was on the other side of the world attending a ceremonial event. No, the culprit is the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target, “pyropolitics,” and the usual climate-change narrative that has become the all-purpose excuse for governmental failure.

Austrian filmmaker Lukas Marxt’s experimental documentary 1.5°C: Pyropolitics and the New World premiered this week at DOK Leipzig. It is largely observational—long takes of flames, firefighters, and aftermath, without talking-head experts or narration beyond an opening quote from philosopher Michael Marder about learning the “language” of pyropolitics. The title itself signals the intended frame: the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal and the idea that human-driven climate forces are dictating the rules of the game. Marxt has said he hopes the film starts “conversations” about how we shape the Earth, while acknowledging it offers no answers. Conversations are fine; however, substituting a preferred narrative for the actual sequence of events is not.

Cal Fire has long stated that roughly 95 percent of California wildfires are human-caused, whether by equipment, vehicles, power infrastructure, debris burning, or arson. The 2025 fires fit that pattern. The Eaton Fire was sparked by an electrical event at a Southern California Edison transmission tower; investigators documented arcing and burning material falling into dry vegetation. The Palisades Fire has been tied to a smaller blaze (the Lachman Fire) ignited on New Year’s Day that smoldered underground before Santa Ana winds drove it into a conflagration. Federal authorities charged Jonathan Rinderknecht with starting that initial fire; he was indicted on multiple arson-related counts, though a 2026 trial ended in a mistrial with a retrial scheduled. These are not abstract climate forces. They are specific human actions and infrastructure failures.

Attribution studies can show that warmer, drier conditions made the fuels more receptive once a spark occurred. That is not the same as saying climate change “caused” the fires or that the primary policy response should be more regulation of the climate rather than preventing ignitions, maintaining infrastructure, and ensuring water is available. When nearly every winter fire in the region is human-started, the conversation that matters most is about the people and systems that light or fail to prevent the match.

While the documentary invites viewers to contemplate 1.5 degrees, the operational record is more prosaic and damning. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, a 117-million-gallon facility serving the Pacific Palisades area, was empty during the fires. It had been taken offline months earlier for repairs to a torn floating cover needed to protect drinking-water quality. High-elevation tanks ran dry under extreme demand—four times normal for hours—and hydrants lost pressure. Governor Newsom ordered an investigation into the water system. The practical reality remains: a major water asset sat empty in a high-risk zone when the fires arrived.

At the same time, Mayor Karen Bass was in Ghana as part of a Biden administration delegation for the inauguration of the country’s president. She left as National Weather Service warnings about extreme fire weather and Santa Ana winds intensified. She returned on January 8 to a burning city and later publicly called the trip a “mistake,” saying she hated being out of town when the city needed her most. Critics noted she had previously promised to limit international travel if elected. City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson was acting mayor when the Palisades Fire broke out.

Independent assessments have catalogued additional problems: delayed evacuation alerts in some neighborhoods, insufficient pre-positioning of resources ahead of known high-risk weather, and communication gaps within incident command. These are failures of preparedness and execution, not evidence that the only relevant variable is global temperature.

The climate-change frame has proven durable precisely because it shifts attention. It converts specific, local, preventable failures into a diffuse, existential crisis that justifies broader governmental authority, regulation, and spending. When officials and filmmakers emphasize the Paris Agreement target while downplaying the human ignition sources and the empty tanks, the public is invited to treat incompetence as inevitable and accountability as secondary to the larger cause.

Wildfires have always occurred in California’s chaparral under Santa Ana conditions. Human development in the wildland-urban interface, accumulated fuels, and ignition sources have amplified the risk. Adding a climate layer does not erase the need for basic competence: keeping reservoirs functional, clearing vegetation near power lines, prosecuting arson, and having elected officials present during foreseeable emergencies.

Marxt’s film may succeed as an atmospheric, observational document of destruction. As an argument that the decisive lesson of the 2025 fires is climate politics rather than the concrete failures that left neighborhoods without water and a mayor out of the country, it is less persuasive. Angelenos already lived through the consequences of those failures. They do not need another film to tell them the real problem was the thermometer.