Based on this study, WRAP calculated that Britain’s recycling efforts reduce its carbon-dioxide emissions by 10m-15m tonnes per year. That is equivalent to a 10% reduction in Britain’s annual carbon-dioxide emissions from transport, or roughly equivalent to taking 3.5m cars off the roads. Similarly, America’s Environmental Protection Agency estimates that recycling reduced the country’s carbon emissions by 49m tonnes in 2005.

Recycling has many other benefits, too. It conserves natural resources. It also reduces the amount of waste that is buried or burnt, hardly ideal ways to get rid of the stuff. (Landfills take up valuable space and emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas; and although incinerators are not as polluting as they once were, they still produce noxious emissions, so people dislike having them around.) But perhaps the most valuable benefit of recycling is the saving in energy and the reduction in greenhouse gases and pollution that result when scrap materials are substituted for virgin feedstock. “If you can use recycled materials, you don’t have to mine ores, cut trees and drill for oil as much,” says Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management, a consulting firm based in Olympia, Washington.

In the context that is Harper’s Canada, activists have to be more creative than usual. The conservatives are stifling debate by not inviting the official opposition to attend the United Nations’ major climate change meeting next month in Bali, Indonesia. As a result, Canadian activists are trying to continue what the current Canadian government dislikes: discussions on climate change. So it is good that the Canadian people actively care about the environment.

A coalition of Canada’s top environmental groups is offering a hand to jilted opposition MPs who want to attend key climate-change talks in Bali, Indonesia.

Environment critics from the three opposition parties were told earlier this week that they would no longer be welcome in the official Canadian delegation attending the United Nations meeting next month.

The government has traditionally allowed opposition MPs, and even non-governmental groups and industry representatives, to tag along to such high-profile summits. The critics were invited to the last major UN climate meeting in Kenya a year ago.

Today we launched the Great Whale Trail, following the migration of humpback whales from the warm tropical waters of the South Pacific, where they breed, to the icy Southern Ocean around Antarctica, where they feed. And we’re doing it via satellite tracking and Google Maps. Nifty.

Video: The Great Whale Trail: meeting the tag team

“We in Costa Rica protect four to five per cent of the world’s biodiversity, and our territory is much, much smaller than four to five per cent of the global territory,” Mr Dobles said.

“So we feel that we are also protecting humanity’s biodiversity, so all the support such as this one is always welcome.”

Governments of 190 countries, in addition to the European Commission, agreed to freeze production of HCFCs at average 2009-10 levels in 2013. That deadline replaces an earlier target of 2016.
Developed countries also have agreed to end HCFC production in 2020, instead of 2030. The pact also says that by 2010 they will reduce production and consumption of HCFCs by 75 per cent and then by 90 per cent by 2015, five years before their final phase-out.

Next month, October (ROCKtober) 16 and 17, to be precise, people will stand up to draw attention to international poverty. You can join millions of people from around the world to send a message to politicians that you Stand Up and Speak Out against poverty and inequality.

In 2000, world leaders from 189 countries signed up to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs ) — a global commitment to halve extreme poverty by 2015.

Last year, more than 23 million people in 87 countries stood up and took action to remind them of this promise. It was the largest single coordinated mobilization in the history of the Guinness World Records.

We’ve already seen a proposal to turn the floating rock into a library. Sure, that idea wasn’t the best. This refined idea has more traction I think.

A group called Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) want to ensure that no matter what happens on the planet Earth, human knowledge will be on the moon.

“In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock, and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth,” Shapiro said.

ARC hopes to finance the planned moon outpost into a lunar ark of recovery in part through donations from billionaire philanthropists.

Blog Action Day, is just one vehicle for that change, but it is a powerful concept: thousands of bloggers unite, for just one day, to talk about one issue. Will that change the world, just one day? Not immediately, but it in effect unites the blogging community. And once the community begins to unite, anything is possible.