2026-02-09 06:00:06
Bad Bunny, the “King of Latin Trap,” will perform the halftime show at the Super Bowl, promising a “huge party.” But his opposition to the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown has led MAGA politicos and media stars to spread rumors in an effort to stoke a backlash against the artist.
Let’s take a look at some of them:
Actually, Bad Bunny is a Puerto Rican native and therefore he’s legally a US citizen. When Lahren was called out for missing this fact, she clarified that she believes he is un-American due to his remarks against ICE and due to his refusal to tour in the US. (The artist has cited his concerns over ICE agents gathering outside his concerts to target his fans.)
Wake up, Mike. Bad Bunny is in fact immensely popular. He was the top artist on Spotify’s global charts from 2020-2022 and 2025. In 2025, he had about 19.8 billion streams on the platform. And he just made history to become the first artist to win the Grammy for Best Album for a record sung entirely in Spanish.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell backed Bad Bunny the day after his success at the Grammys, noting his popularity. “It’s one of the reasons we chose him,” Goodell said last Monday. “The other reason is he understood the platform he was on. This platform is used to unite people.”
He continued: “I think artists in the past have done that. Bad Bunny understands that and I think he’ll have a great show.”
This “hatred” is Bad Bunny’s criticism of Trump and his administration’s violence against immigrants, communities of color, and protesters. And this criticism has often been far from hateful. During the artist’s Grammy acceptance speech, he said, “If we fight, we have to do it with love. We don’t hate them. We love our people. We love our family.”
Criticism of ICE is popular—65 percent of Americans said the federal agency has “gone too far” in its brutal enforcement of immigration laws in polls conducted late last month.
“We don’t hate them. We love our people. We love our family.”
And in fact, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote last month, the push to “sow hatred” could better describe Trump’s campaign of terror to redefine who belongs in the US.
Last October, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said ICE agents would be at the Super Bowl. “There is nowhere that you can provide safe haven to people who are in this country illegally,” Corey Lewandowski, senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security and Trump’s first campaign manager in his 2016 presidential campaign, said that same week. “Not the Super Bowl and nowhere else.”
The NFL insisted on Tuesday that ICE officers would not be present at the game.
“There are no planned ICE enforcement activities. We are confident of that,” Lanier, the league’s chief security officer said at a security briefing. As of Sunday early afternoon, there have been no reports of ICE presence at the stadium.
The right has put together an alternative Super Bowl performance featuring Kid Rock. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Donald Trump would “much prefer to watch” Kid Rock over Bad Bunny.
But this attempt to replace Bad Bunny with who they consider a more “American” artist is clearly not working. Kid Rock’s televised performance of “The All-American Halftime Show,” which is sponsored by the late Charlie Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, has lost multiple performers in the lead-up to the Super Bowl. The rock band Shinedown announced on Friday that it would drop out as taking part would “create further division.”
2026-02-09 04:14:24
A group of survivors of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein released an advertisement that will air during the Super Bowl imploring for the full release of millions of government files revealing the connections between Epstein and many famous politicians and celebrities.
The ad was posted on X by journalist Jim Acosta. It comes a day before Congress is expected to be able to finally read unredacted versions of the Epstein files, according to a letter by a Justice Department official obtained by MS Now.
2026-02-08 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Yale e360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The world is poised to overshoot the goal of limiting average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as for the first time, a three-year period, ending in 2025, has breached the threshold. And climate scientists are predicting devastating consequences, just as the world’s governments appear to have lost their appetite for tackling the emissions that are causing the warming.
The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago, at the insistence of more vulnerable nations, to forestall severe weather impacts and potential runaway warming that could lead to exceeding irreversible planetary tipping points. But climate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. “Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,” says atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the U.N.’s arbiters of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Meanwhile, a picture of what lies ahead is becoming clearer. In particular, there is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points—thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.
“We are rapidly approaching multiple Earth system tipping points that could transform our world with devastating consequences for people and nature,” says British global-systems researcher Tim Lenton, of the University of Exeter. If he and other scientists are right, then hopes currently being expressed of a temperature reset by reducing emissions after overshoot may be fanciful. Before we know it, there may be no way back.
The effects of imminent 1.5-degree overshoot are already apparent in a rising tide of weather catastrophes: soaring heatstroke deaths in India, Africa, and the Middle East; unprecedented wildfires in the United States; and escalating property damage and floods from tropical storms and extreme precipitation.
Last year, Bailing Li of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center disclosed that her agency held non-peer-reviewed data showing a dramatic increase in the intensity of the world’s weather in the past five years. Meanwhile, the International Chamber of Commerce reported that extreme weather linked to the changing climate had cost the global economy more than $2 trillion in the past decade and damaged the lives and livelihoods of a fifth of the world’s population.
But that is just the start. Climate change is gathering pace. The last three years have been the hottest on record, with both 2023 and 2025 nearly reaching 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, and 2024 hitting 1.55 degrees.
A three-year breach of 1.5 degrees does not mean we have broken the Paris limit, which is framed as a long-term average. Conventionally, scientists measure this over 20 years, to smooth out year-on-year aberrations caused by natural cycles such as the El Niño oscillation. Using this method, it will be several more years before researchers can say for certain if warming has reached 1.5 degrees. But according to two studies published last year, the world has likely already surpassed this critical threshold.
Without an abrupt change of course, the warming will only accelerate. James Hansen, the Columbia University climatologist who first put climate change on the world’s front pages during testimony to Senate hearings in 1988, believes we could hit 2 degrees C as soon as 2045, a forecast based on several climate models under a high-emissions scenario.
The reason for the escalation is that the climate system is in a pincer grip. First, emissions of planet-warming gases remain stubbornly high, and second, natural carbon sinks are weakening. The result is an accelerating rise in atmospheric concentrations of CO2—2024 saw the biggest jump ever.
“Current policy thinking doesn’t usually take tipping points into account.”
The faltering natural sink is perplexing scientists. For as long as we know, nature has been quietly mitigating our damage to the climate by soaking up around half of all the CO2 we put into the air. Trees have grown faster in a warmer climate, capturing carbon in the process; oceans have been absorbing excess atmospheric CO2, burying it in the depths.
But now oceans are becoming more stratified, reducing their ability to remove CO2. And trees are succumbing to heat and drought.
A string of recent research papers has reported an “unprecedented” weakening of natural land-based carbon sinks in 2023 and 2024, triggered in part by an epidemic of extreme wildfires, which have doubled globally in the past two decades. African rainforests, previously responsible for around a fifth of the terrestrial take-up of CO2, recently turned from a long-term carbon sink to a source.
Looking forward, the predicted death of the Amazon rainforest would load billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. And the melting of Arctic permafrost, which is already underway, will unlock huge volumes of frozen methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Researchers last year concluded that this methane will have a “critical role…in amplifying climate change under overshoot scenarios,” making a comeback from that overshoot significantly harder.
“We are seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems,” concluded Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.”
These escalating impacts could soon lead to irreversible damage to the climate and ecosystems, scientists warn. In the past three years, unprecedented warming of the oceans has led to an epidemic of marine heat waves. The waters of northwest Europe last spring were up to 4 degrees C (7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. In the tropics, ocean heating is triggering a rising rate of cyclones, and ever more loss of coral.
Researchers say tropical coral reefs may have already crossed a tipping point, portending mass dieback. Studies suggest they may all be dead by mid-century, with massive repercussions for wider marine ecosystems and fish stocks, which are heavily dependent on reefs as nurseries and feeding grounds.
Near the poles, some ice sheets may already have been irreversibly destabilized. Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice every hour. The “current best assessment,” Watson says, is that this melting could become unstoppable at around 1.5 degrees. The giant Arctic island’s estimated 2,800 trillion tons of ice would take centuries to melt into the ocean. But that would eventually raise sea levels globally by around 23 feet. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet faces a similar fate.
Likewise, ocean circulation systems could be approaching breakdown. These currents move vast amounts of heat around the globe, dictating much of the weather over adjacent land. Most at risk, modelers suggest, is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which currently warms Europe and the eastern coast of North America with the Gulf Stream.
Hansen has argued that “shutdown of the AMOC is likely within the next 20-30 years, unless actions are taken to reduce global warming.” Other studies suggest it is unlikely this century, or that we may soon pass a tipping point beyond which it is inevitable. A 2025 Global Tipping Points Report, led by Lenton, said AMOC’s failure would “plunge northwest Europe into prolonged severe winters.”
A modeling study of a range of potential tipping points by researchers at the Potsdam Institute found that if the world did not get back to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century, there was a one in four chance at least one major global threshold—it listed the collapse of AMOC, the Amazon rainforest ecosystem, or the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheet—would be crossed. “If we were to also surpass 2 degrees C of global warming, tipping risks would escalate even more rapidly,” says coauthor Annika Ernest Högner.
There are also fears of a domino effect, in which crossing one tipping point triggers the exceeding of another. One scenario sees the melting of Greenland ice turning off the AMOC, which in turn is the final straw for the Amazon rainforest. But much remains unclear—including whether the risks of exceeding tipping points are less if the overshoot is short term.
Because tipping points are hard to model with any precision, and harder still to predict, they are often left out of climate projections—and hence are still largely ignored by climate negotiators. “Current policy thinking doesn’t usually take tipping points into account,” says Manjana Milkoreit of the University of Oslo, a lead author of the 2025 Global Tipping Points Report.
The science is shaping up to suggest that the damage done by an imminent overshoot of the 1.5-degree threshold may not be easily undone. Still, that looks like the world we are entering. So, how could we draw carbon out of the atmosphere by achieving the “negative emissions” that might bring temperatures back down and, in the best-case scenario, stabilize the climate system?
The most obvious action is to bolster and increase carbon sinks by planting trees or encouraging natural forest regrowth. In the past decade, the world has developed a modest carbon market, using forestry and other projects that soak up CO2 to earn carbon credits that can be sold to offset carbon emissions by industry and nations.
The market has been widely discredited by failed, poorly monitored, and fraudulent forest schemes. But, if better managed and audited, it could be repurposed as part of an effort to generate negative emissions.
One proposal favored by many climate scientists would have the trees harvested and burned in power stations, so new carbon-grabbing trees could be planted on the vacated land. If the power-plant CO2 emissions were then captured and kept out of the atmosphere, the result could be an energy system that drew CO2 out of the air.
But the scientific consensus is that there isn’t room on a crowded planet for enough forests. Currently, work to protect and restore forests is soaking up an estimated 2 billion tons of CO2 annually. But lowering global temperatures by an average of even 0.1 degrees C would require a total of 100 times more, according to the IPCC. And recent studies suggest 400 billion tons might be required to get back to 1.5 C by 2100.
Proposed solutions like solar radiation would be like “turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire,” a scientist says.
Another idea is to industrialize carbon capture through the mass deployment of chemical plants that use solvents to extract CO2 from the air and convert it to inert material. This remains, at least for now, prohibitively expensive, costing hundreds of dollars for every ton removed.
Many scientists regard such carbon-capturing solutions as fanciful. And, given that we may need them in a hurry after some major planetary emergency such as warding off a tipping point, they could not be deployed fast enough. If a quick fix were needed—even a temporary one to “peak shave” temperatures while negative emissions were fast-tracked—we would need some form of outright geoengineering.
Most likely, these scientists say, this would involve shading the Earth from solar radiation by injecting into the stratosphere sulphur aerosols similar to those sometimes released in volcanic eruptions. Spraying from fleets of aircraft would have to continue for as long as the cooling was required. But it might work, and it might do so quickly and cheaply enough to be a realistic proposition. Researchers are enthusiastic. The British government last year invested $80 million to explore the potential of solar modification, including small-scale real-world experiments.
But others are horrified. They warn that leaving atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels high will also leave the world’s weather systems fundamentally altered. Even if the shading can get us back to 1.5 C of warming, the weather will not revert.
“Having temperature targets makes solar engineering seem like a sensible approach because it may lower temperatures,” says Watson. “But it does this not by reducing but increasing our interference in the climate system.” The world’s weather would still be broken. He likens it to “turning on the air conditioning in response to a house fire.”
IPCC scientists have consistently argued that achieving the Paris target will ultimately require some form of negative emissions. But it took until the 2025 climate conference in Belem, Brazil, for UN negotiators to acknowledge the need to address how to handle an overshoot, declaring in its final statement that “both the extent and duration of an overshoot need to be limited,” though without going into further detail. So far, only Denmark has a national negative emissions target—promising reductions of 110 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.
Negative emissions are “not a political project yet,” says Oliver Geden of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. And even the suggestion seems optimistic right now, when even modest international efforts to achieve “net zero” emissions by mid-century are falling far short, and the world’s second largest emitter, the US, has exited the entire project.
But the warnings are stark. Without action to draw down atmospheric carbon, the climate system will likely move into an era of accelerated warming that may be impossible to halt. Overshoot will be permanent.
2026-02-08 01:11:53
President Donald Trump’s legal team submitted false information to the Supreme Court in his ongoing legal battle against author E. Jean Carroll—whom he was found liable for sexually assaulting in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in 1996—according to documents reviewed by Mother Jones.
Justin D. Smith, Trump’s lawyer in the case, misrepresented the plot of an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in a November 2025 petition to the court. Trump, along with some of his supporters, has for years claimed that Carroll’s account of him raping and sexually assaulting her was copied from the 2012 SVU episode.
Friends of Carroll confirm she told them about Trump’s assault years before the episode was filmed.
Trump is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a $5 million judgment from 2023, when a federal jury held that he sexually abused Carroll and then defamed her. (A separate $83.3 million defamation judgement against him from 2024 is not directly at issue, but could be in the future if the Court sides with Trump.) The justices are scheduled to review Trump’s petition on February 20.
In the Supreme Court petition, Smith describes the episode as featuring “a business mogul” who “fantasizes about raping a victim in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room.” He writes that the “plotline is virtually identical to the false allegations that Carroll launched against President Trump.”
In the episode from season 13, entitled “Theatre Tricks,” there is a small plotline about a sexual encounter in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room. But the man involved is a prominent New York City judge, not, as Smith claimed, a “business mogul.” And what happened in the dressing room, which is discussed but not shown in the episode, was pre-planned and by all accounts consented to. A person with knowledge of how the SVU episode came together told CNN in 2019 that there’s “no correlation—none whatsoever” between “Theatre Tricks” and Carroll’s allegations against Trump. Carroll has repeatedly denied she made up her allegation based on the episode. At least two friends of Carroll have confirmed the author told them about the assault shortly after it took place and years before the episode was filmed or broadcast.
Smith did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on the false information included in the petition. Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer in the case, also did not respond to a request for comment.
The Rules of the Supreme Court say that petitioners must present information with “accuracy, brevity, and clarity.” Failure to do so, per Rule 14.4, “is sufficient reason for the Court to deny a petition.” It is unclear if Trump’s lawyer knowingly included inaccurate information or failed to confirm the details of the episode in question.
The plot of “Theatre Tricks” involves a struggling young actress who seeks out sex work on a sugar daddy website, where she meets a judge who she helps fulfill a “stranger rape fantasy” that involves invading a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room while a woman tries on lingerie. It is one of over 550 SVU episodes spread across more than two dozen seasons containing hundreds of different examples of sexual violence—from harassment all the way to murder. The dressing room meet-up with the judge is mentioned for less than one minute in “Theatre Tricks,” which centers on a separate, nonconsensual sexual assault experienced by another character.
Carroll’s first public account of what happened with Trump in that dressing room around three decades ago came in a 2019 New York magazine article, excerpting her upcoming book. She detailed running into Trump when he asked her to advise him on a gift for, as she quoted him, “a girl.” They went around the store before he led them to the lingerie section, she wrote.
What unfolded next, as Carroll has since described many times, was Trump leading her into the dressing room, lunging at her, pushing her against the wall, pulling down her tights, using his fingers on her sexually, and penetrating her with his penis. Carroll wrote that she was eventually able to push him off and run out.
Carroll later sued Trump in 2022 for sexual battery and for defaming her by denying it through New York’s Adult Survivors Act. While Carroll has maintained that Trump used his fingers and penis in the assault, the jury, which ultimately awarded her $5 million, stopped short of finding Trump liable for rape under penile penetration. They found that Trump had “forcibly penetrated Ms. Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, causing immediate pain and long lasting emotional and psychological harm,” according to District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the case.
The legal definition for rape differs by state and, at the time, New York’s law required penile penetration. (In January 2024, New York broadened its rape law to include other kinds of nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact.) Despite that, Judge Kaplan wrote in 2023 that the jury’s decision “does not mean” that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’” “Indeed,” he continued, “the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”
Trump has consistently denied the claims, saying over the years that Carroll is a “nut job,” “mentally sick,” and “not my type.” He has posted on social media more than 100 times about her accusations.
Smith’s faulty description of the SVU episode was detailed by David Boyle, a California lawyer with a habit of filing amicus briefs on major Supreme Court cases. In his early January submission in support of Carroll, Boyle writes of “Trump’s disrespect for rape victims,” and calls out how the president’s filling “makes up a television-show character, or at least the character’s profession, to discredit Carroll.”
Why did Boyle write the brief? “It’s a famous case, and I don’t like rapists,” he says, “even if it’s quote-unquote ‘just’ a digital rapist,” dryly noting Judge Kaplan’s holding about penetration.
“This is the Supreme Court. People are supposed to be on good behavior, their best behavior, and do things in good faith,” Boyle says. “He’s the president. We’re paying him a salary to be president. He’s supposed to be—laugh as you will, knowing who he is—a role model.”
Boyle’s amicus brief was one of five submitted to the court. The other four are in support of Donald Trump and his argument that certain evidence used in the previous trial was inadmissible. Those briefs do not mention the SVU episode, nor does Trump’s legal team’s latest filing from January 28.
Trump, members of his legal teams, and some of his supporters have called on the SVU episode for years while attempting to discredit Carroll.
Within days of Carroll’s account originally being published in New York, a short clip from “Theatre Tricks” started circulating online. “Looks like that lunatic E. Jean Caroll got the idea about getting ‘raped’ by Trump in a dressing room at Burgdorfs while trying on lingerie from an episode of Law and Order SVU,” Mark Dice, a right-wing commentator with nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers, asserted. David J. Harris Jr, now host of The Pulse on Newsmax, wrote a post entitled, “Proof That Trump Accuser is a Fraud…Story Came From Law and Order SVU.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also amplified the claim on his website InfoWars. Even Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, retweeted the clip, according to a CNN report from 2019.
During Carroll’s 2023 civil trial against Trump, his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, brought up the episode. While testifying in that trial, Carroll’s lawyer Michael Ferrara asked her if she was “making up your allegation based on a popular TV show?”
“No,” Carroll responded. “No.”
2026-02-08 00:20:14
Vice President JD Vance, standing alongside Second Lady Usha Vance, was met with a chorus of boos at Friday’s Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan. As team USA entered San Siro Stadium, the crowd cheered—but that was cut short when the Vances came on the big screen.
As the New York Times reported, “Their appearance on the screens lasted for only a few seconds,” but the boos “were audible despite the loud music playing for the parade.”
Hours before the ceremony, hundreds of protestors took part in a student-led demonstration against the presence of US immigration agents at the winter games. Officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations team are in Milan to “vet and mitigate risks from transnational criminal organizations,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has said that the ICE personnel in the country “are not operational agents.” Protestors called for the removal of ICE, along with Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also attending, from the games.
When asked about Vance’s icy welcome on Air Force One, President Donald Trump said it was “surprising.”
“Is that true? That’s surprising because people like him,” he said. “I mean, he is in a foreign country in all fairness. He doesn’t get booed in this country.”
Except, Vance has been booed at events multiple times in the US.
While on the campaign trail in August 2024, Vance was booed at a firefighters convention in Boston after claiming that he and Trump were the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” In March, the vice president received screaming boos as he attended a Kennedy Center symphony performance. A few months later, in August, Vance, Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were all heckled and booed in Washington, DC’s Union Station as they went to meet National Guard troops deployed to the city.
At the opening ceremony, some in the crowd noted that the boos appeared to clearly be directed at the Vances—and not at the athletes competing for the US.
“It was quick but noticeable,” wrote Juliette Kayyem, an Obama-era DHS official who is attending the games, of the Vances’ booing. “But,” she continued, “I want to point out that the crowd was loud and supportive when Team USA came out. It was lovely to hear. And quite a juxtaposition.”
2026-02-07 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The year 2010 was a reckoning for Japan’s economic security.
On September 7, the Chinese fishing trawler Minjinyu 5179 refused an order by Japan’s coast guard to leave disputed waters near the Senkaku Islands, which are known in China as Diaoyu. The vessel then rammed two patrol boats, escalating a decades-long territorial feud.
Japan responded by arresting the captain, Zhan Qixiong, under domestic law, a move Beijing considered an unacceptable assertion of Japanese sovereignty. Amid mounting protests in both countries and the collapse of high-level talks, China cut exports of rare earth elements to Japan, which relied upon its geopolitical adversary for 90 percent of its supply. The move reverberated throughout the global economy as companies like Toyota and Panasonic were left without materials crucial to the production of everything from hybrid cars to personal electronics.
It wasn’t long before Japan gave in and let Qixiong go. The crisis, which garnered worldwide attention, became a catalyst for Japan’s push to secure a reliable supply of critical minerals. “That was the turning point,” said Takahiro Kamisuna, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
Fifteen years later, that reckoning has only deepened.
China still provides 60 percent of Japan’s critical minerals, a reliance that has grown riskier as Beijing asserts its position as the world’s dominant supplier. Last month, Japan took a bold step to break that dependence when it launched a five-week deep-sea mining test off Minamitorishima Island. A crew of 130 researchers aboard the Chikyu—Japanese for “earth”—will use what is essentially a robotic vacuum cleaner to collect mud from a depth of 6,000 meters, marking the world’s first attempt at prolonged collection of minerals from great depths.
“I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”
Seabed mud off the coast of that uninhabited island, which sits 1,180 miles southeast of Tokyo, is rich in rare earths like neodymium and yttrium—distinct from the potato-shaped polymetallic nodules often associated with marine extraction. Such materials are essential for electric vehicles, solar panels, advanced weapons systems, and other technology.
The expedition, which is expected to end February 14, is being led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, which did not respond to a request for comment. It comes three months after the country signed an agreement with the United States to collaborate on securing a supply of critical minerals. It also propels Japan to the forefront of a growing debate over how far nations should go to secure these materials. Deep-sea mining “is not a new thing,” Kamisuna said, “it’s just gaining more attention mainly because of geopolitical tensions.”
The trawler incident highlighted a vulnerability that successive governments vowed to alleviate. Many criticized then-prime minister Naoto Kan of the country’s center-left party for capitulating to China, but he pledged to never again let Japan’s industrial future hinge on a single supplier. His successor, Shinzo Abe of the center-right party, was more aggressive and saw critical minerals as not just an economic issue, but a matter of national security that must be addressed even if it meant exploiting the deep sea.
Establishing a domestic supply could help Japan reach its goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, a high priority for Yoshihide Suga, who succeeded Abe. Although Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, an Abe protégé who assumed office late last year, supports the 2050 timeline, she has said the transition must not risk Japan’s industrial competitiveness and energy stability.
Takaichi has proposed slashing subsidies for large-scale solar projects or batteries, largely because so much of that technology is imported from China. Instead, she has hailed nuclear power as the path toward carbon neutrality. With the mining experiment unfolding in the Pacific, Takaichi hopes to secure a strategic reserve of minerals to protect key industries.
But Japan doesn’t face an either-or choice, said Jane Nakano, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. “Energy security and energy transition are closely tied,” she said.
“To me, it’s much more about the pace, not so much the direction,” said Nakano, who has worked for the US Department of Energy and for the energy attaché at the US embassy in Tokyo. “I don’t find Takaichi’s way of framing this dual challenge—energy security and decarbonization—unique to Japan. A lot of G7 countries are starting to recalibrate again, so they do have to think about international competitiveness. Direction-wise, [Japan] is just aligning itself with the political establishment and the industry.”
Unlike China, Japan lacks the sedimentary geology associated with rare earth deposits, requiring it to look toward the waters within its exclusive economic zones. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Japan has the right to exploit the resources within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, which includes the atoll island of Minamitorishima.
Although the minerals to be found there lie nearly 20,000 feet beneath the surface, proponents of digging them up argue the challenge of extracting them and the cost of refining them is justified by mounting geopolitical tension. With Takaichi’s recent political jabs at Beijing, China has begun choking off its exports to Japan. Nakano said Japanese officials seem “confident” in the outcome of the experiment. “They’ve determined that it merits to have this demonstration of technologies and equipment this time around,” she said.
Japan’s foray into deep-sea mining comes amid mounting concern about the ecological cost of such technology. Scientists and environmental groups warn that marine extraction is racing ahead of our understanding of the impacted ecosystems. They are particularly concerned about sediment plumes, noise and light pollution, and damage to habitats and food webs, noting that scars left by equipment could render the seafloor uninhabitable for decades, even centuries.
“A tiny little nudge, and the whole seafloor is disturbed,” said Travis Washburn, a marine biologist at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. He studies deep-sea environments and human impacts on marine ecosystems, and he has analyzed the waters around Minamitorishima Island and represented Japan at International Seabed Authority workshops. He believes that mining rare earths from mud could have the same impact as mining nodules. “I think that they’re both pretty much going to destroy the habitat directly affected.”
Government officials insist the ecological impacts will be closely monitored. But assessing them could be difficult, because the seafloor around the island, home to sea cucumbers, sponges, corals, and potentially rare endemic species—remains the subject of intense study. Scientists fear these ecosystems may be permanently altered before anyone assesses them. As with many extractive industries, Washburn noted, technology is often deployed before anyone fully understands its environmental impacts.
Shigeru Tanaka, deputy director general of the Pacific Asia Resource Center, is an outspoken critic of deep-sea mining. He argues that the industry as a whole disregards international law and that exploiting the seafloor will harm fisheries and trample upon the rights of Pacific Islanders who consider the sea as sacred. (The Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands have raised such concerns in opposing Trump administration plans to open the waters there to mining.) He also believes that some of the experts involved in Japan’s project “are not really taking seriously the risks to the environment and how irreversible it may be.”
Even some government officials have expressed concern. Yoshihito Doi of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy has said Japan should mine only “if we can establish a robust system that properly takes environmental impacts into account.”
It remains unclear what exactly is unfolding beneath the waves during this current test, but based upon his experience working with the Japanese government on similar research, Washburn said the top priority will be assessing whether the technology works. Researchers also will monitor how much material the system can hold and if the machinery can keep the sea mud contained without releasing a massive sediment plume on the seafloor or in the water column.
If Japan can successfully deploy a 6,000-meter pipe that can suck up 35 metric tons of mud under extreme pressure—about 8,700 pounds per square inch, or 600 times the pressure at sea level—government officials say a broader trial, which may include polymetallic nodules, could begin in February 2027.
One longer-term goal is to develop what’s called “hybrid mining.” Because deep-sea polymetallic nodules sit atop the rare-earth mud around Minamitorishima Island, researchers are exploring whether both could be collected and separated in a single operation.
Kamisuna said Japan faces another challenge: The energy needed to acquire and refine a stockpile. “If we want to create a sufficient reserve for rare earth [minerals], either using domestic or export, a large amount of electricity is required,” he said. “And the question is, What are we going to use, liquified natural gas or coal? What is the environmental cost?”
Using more environmentally friendly methods of extraction and processing can be expensive, he said—which is one reason many countries turn to China as a cheaper option.
For now, Japan’s deep-sea mining experiment seems to have drawn little public opposition at home, unlike in the United States and Australia where environmental activists and Indigenous communities have pushed back against such operations, particularly around the Pacific Islands. In the meantime, the country’s test moves forward, even as the implications of success, and questions about its long-term impact, remain unresolved.
“We are not prepared,” Tanaka said. “My personal take is that by the time we are ready, when the technology and the science is set, I really do not think there would be a demand for it.”
