Last summer, we brought you the details of San Jose's "Green Vision" plan, where the city aspires to become 100 percent energy independent and waste-free by 2023.  One of the key components of that plan is a biogas plant that would be responsible for a large chunk of the city's electricity and stop waste from going into landfills.  Now, a year later, the San Jose City Council gave an initial go-ahead for the plant and the city is one step closer to making it a reality.

The biogas facility would be the country's first organics-to-energy biogas plant, a technology already being used in Germany and Italy.  The plant would create energy through breaking down food waste and also organic solid waste through dry anaerobic fermentation, creating methane.  The process is different because it's done without oxygen and breaks down solid waste that normally ends up in landfills, not just wet waste.  The Zanker Road Biogas facility would process 150,000 tons of the organic waste, producing electricity and compost that will be used as fertilizer.

The resulting electricity will power the water pollution plant and be sold to the grid.  The facility will be located between two solid-waste recovery and recycling plants, removing any chance of neighborhood complaints.

via USA Today

The U.N. has launched a social media site to inspire international leaders to create a meaningful climate treaty in Copenhagen this December.  The site called Hopenhagen, allows people around the world to create a Twitter-like post (45 characters max) answering the question "What gives you hope for a better planet?"

The site reads:

On December 7, 2009, leaders from 192 countries will gather at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark to determine the fate of our planet. Let's turn Copenhagen into Hopenhagen. Hopenhagen is a movement, a moment and a chance at a new beginning. The hope that we can create a global community that will lead our leaders into making the right decisions. The hope that by solving our environmental crisis, we can solve our economic crisis at the same time. Hopenhagen is change – and that change will be powered by all of us.

As people post their responses, a constant moving feed runs down the screen, listing all the statements.  Obviously, it will take more than 45-character expressions to produce an effective climate treaty, but the more pressure we can put on the world's leaders to commit to significant change, the better.

via Environmental Capital