Axios

The Lower 48 states have seen record-shattering warmth so far this December, with temperatures running as high as 35°F above average for this time of year. The warmth has been so pronounced that during the weekend, brush fires broke out in a snowless, unusually mild Denver metro area.

The big picture: The jet stream, which is a river of air that rides at about 30,000 feet along the temperature contrast between air masses, steering storms as it goes, has been stuck in a position well north of the contiguous U.S., keeping storms and cold weather at bay.

The Adam McKay film “Don’t Look Up,” coming to Netflix later this month, is a gut-punch of a climate change comedy disguised as a movie about a comet headed directly at Earth.

Driving the news: In a virtual press conference Sunday, the film’s stars discussed how they constructed a comedy about a fictional doomsday crisis that’s a stand-in for another, all-too-real-life threat.

Two wide-angle new essays explore how the global movement away from fossil fuels could be wrenching and geopolitically messy.

Driving the news: Adam Tooze's piece in Foreign Policy covers a lot of ground. One key takeaway: He warns that it's not clear if the red-blue U.S. political and policy divide will ever be successfully bridged, despite clean energy's growth in conservative states, its growing economic importance and Wall Street's increasing buy-in.

One persistent theme in analyses of the transition to cleaner energy is the scramble to obtain supplies needed for renewables projects, electric vehicle batteries and other low-carbon tech.

The big picture: "A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant," the International Energy Agency noted in a report this year on critical minerals.