Daily Briefing: Tues.

SETTING LIMITS: The United States will give the world what it wants — a specific, short-term target for reducing its greenhouse gas emissions in time for next month's U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen — a senior White House official announced Monday. Global leaders have been pushing their American counterparts to set a number, following the lead of nations ranging from Brazil to Russia, even though fellow super-emitter China is refusing to set an emissions target of its own. By agreeing to set a specific target, however, the Obama administration could be digging itself a bit of a hole — U.S. negotiators can't promise more than what Congress might actually agree upon next year, when senators will pick up where they left off on this year's attempted climate bill. Of course, the negotiators will also leave the United States as an easy scapegoat for scuttling the global treaty if they can't come up with some kind of firm commitment, and they do at least have some guidelines. The House climate bill that passed in June called for a 17 percent reduction from 2005 levels of U.S. emissions, and the latest Senate version sets a 20 percent target (although that's likely to be watered down in future compromises). The White House official said Monday that a target will be announced "in coming days," and added that President Obama will decide soon whether to attend the Copenhagen conference, which runs from Dec. 7 to Dec. 18. Obama has said he'll attend if doing so would help produce a treaty. (Sources: New York Times, BBC News)

 

UP AND ATOM: The U.S. environmental movement was spurred in the 1960s and '70s partly by a growing distrust of nuclear power, perhaps an easy target thanks to its large, ominous cooling towers and the association with atomic bombs. And there are still serious drawbacks, namely the issues of cost and nuclear waste. Still, with climate change quickly emerging as the planet's most severe ecological disorder, carbon-free nuclear power has begun winning back the public, and even many environmentalists who had long opposed it. "It really is a question about the greater evil — nuclear waste or climate change," says former Greenpeace official Stephen Tindale, once an anti-nuclear activist. "But there is no contest anymore. Climate change is the bigger threat, and nuclear is part of the answer." The Washington Post reports today on the prospects of an atom-smashing renaissance in the United States, where no nuclear plants have opened in the past 13 years. Critics still worry about where we'll store radioactive waste or how we'll pay for a new generation of plants that often blow past their cost projections, but many other countries are already on board the nuclear bandwagon — 53 new plants are now under construction worldwide, double the total just five years ago. And with Senate Democrats scrambling for Republican votes on their climate bill, nuclear power may be poised for a comeback, too. "Like many of us, I began to slowly realize we don't have the luxury anymore of excluding nuclear energy," Tindale says. "We need all the help we can get." (Source: Washington Post)

 

BIG BANG FOR THE BUCK: Scientists inched another step closer toward solving some of the universe's biggest mysteries on Monday, as they began circulating proton beams in opposite directions simultaneously at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The $10 billion particle accelerator has been undergoing repairs for more than a year after a malfunction spoiled its much-hyped original launch in September 2008, and scientists caution that it could still be several years before it reveals the elusive Higgs boson, aka the "God particle." The LHC's ultimate goal is to simulate the conditions a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, hopefully shedding light on why Einstein's theory of relativity doesn't make sense with quantum physics, in addition to possibly explaining other mysteries of physics such as dark matter and supersymmetry. The proton beams began traveling Monday at nearly the speed of light through a 17-mile tunnel deep underneath the French-Swiss border, and proton collisions — the crux of the LHC's research — could begin within 10 days. The machine is currently running at 450 billion electron volts of electricity, but will eventually be raised to more than 6 trillion electron volts. (Sources: USA Today, New Scientist)

 

LAST RESORT: Giant monolith hotels dominate many Caribbean beaches, churning hordes of tourists in and out while funneling much of the money to the foreign companies that own them. This has degraded many of the region's beaches and other ecosystems, in addition to denying impoverished locals the chance to at least profit from their homeland's exploitation. In today's Science Times, Cornelia Dean looks at an inspiring, albeit daunting, example of one town in the Dominican Republic that's trying to do things differently. Aided by a project with Columbia University's Center for Environment, Economy and Society, the town of Miches is inventing a new model for grassroots eco-tourism as a way to develop blighted slums into a sustainable, locally owned paradise. It stands in stark contrast to Punta Cana (pictured above), a traditional high-volume resort that was built on undeveloped land 60 miles to the west, and the fact that Miches is already developed, downtrodden and packed with 9,000 people will make things much harder. Still, with few pristine Caribbean ecosystems remaining, Columbia conservation biologist Donald Melnick says it's worth the effort, even though he admits he "grossly underestimated" the time it would take. "They said, 'Look, we are poor, we don't have very much, but we have Miches,'" Melnick describes of his early interactions with the locals. "'But with all this development going on in the Dominican Republic, if you come back in 10 years, we will still be poor, but Miches will not be ours.'" (Source: NY Times)

 

NO FLU AT THE ZOO: A panda research center in China has closed its doors to visitors, the AP reports, for fear that its prized endangered animals might catch swine flu from a contagious onlooker. There have been no reported cases of pandas contracting this year's novel H1N1 virus, and it's not even known if they can. But after an Iowa cat came down with swine flu last month and some U.S. ferrets apparently also died from the disease, the panda center isn't taking any chances. Zoo employees have seen a spike in their H1N1 cases following a week of cold temperatures and heavy snow, leading management to stop recruiting new volunteers and denying sick employees access to the pandas. The first human flu death in the Shaanxi province, where the zoo is located, came on Nov. 20, and at least 13 other province residents are now critically ill with the virus. (Source: Associated Press)

 

— Russell McLendon