Thanks to companies like NativeEnergy, the carbon-neutral movement - buying so-called green tags to offset CO2 emissions - is well into its hipster moment. Shows by Ben Harper, Radiohead and Death Cab for Cutie at Berkley's green Greek theater this summer will be carbon neutral, courtesy of NativeEnergy and Clif Bar. The Dave Matthews Band recently bought renewable credits from NativeEnergy for all of its 15 years of (almost nonstop) touring. Even we mere mortals can opt in through such low-dollar programs like the company's CoolDriver and WindBuilders.

NativeEnergy also provided offsets for production of Al Gore's paradigm-flouting climate flick, An Inconvenient Truth- as well as Gore's travel while promoting the film, and offsetting emissions from printing the Inconvenient Truth book.

The company has a unique take on fueling the movement. Rather than purchasing energy from existing alternative sources, money made from green tags is invested in new renewable energy projects - wind farms on Native American land, methane-capture on Pennsylvanian dairy farms - thereby adding to the country's pool of clean energy.

Lime recently caught up with Tom Boucher, NativeEnergy's president and CEO.

LIME: Tell us a bit of the background of NativeEnergy.

NativeEnergy launched in 2000 after the first round of deregulated power marketing, when consumers could choose their electric suppliers. [While] that finally allowed for green energy services providers, it proved to be a very difficult market. I was active in the creation of Green Mountain Energy back in the mid-1990s, and I was very interested in taking advantage of the emerging renewable credits market. It really allows folks, without involving their utility company, to green up their electricity power and offset their home energy use, their travel, driving their cars. We wanted to make it easy and straightforward for people to take steps to combat global warming.

We began with that single project, geared toward households, but very soon thereafter we began to talk about entire carbon footprints, for traveling, for businesses. The first thing we did was expand WindBuilders our wind farm building program. We expanded CoolBusiness, our green program for businesses, and from there we've begun to mix other sources - solar projects, farm methane projects.

LIME: What's the NativeEnergy approach to renewable energy credits?

Tom Boucher: In the conventional approach, an alternative energy project is financed with the hope that it will be able to sell renewable energy credits in the future; that, or the producer doesn't really need the offset funding, but getting it will make the whole operation much more profitable.

What we're trying to do is helping to build demand. It's risky, because there are very few big contracts that buy renewable energy credits - it's really only in markets where green power is required by some kind of regulation. So a lack of long-term contracts means a lot of long-term projects - wind farms, solar farms - don't get built.

We focus on a unique aspect of the market by allowing customers to help set up new renewable projects. What we do is pay for [alternative energy projects] up front. This brings the project the dollars, and it brings our customers certainty of power that they can use to offset their own use. We purchase these offsets up front and make payments to the projects, which helps them get up and running. Our customers actually acquire a share of the offsets that these projects will produce - they're helping something happen that might not otherwise happen.

The financing technique can be applied to any technology that needs the final push to get going. Because a project is being paid for it up front, it's the reverse of a mortgage: A project gets paid for beforehand, which is better than taking out a loan carried over time. As the project moves over 20 or 25 years, this process can reduce the upfront costs by half by avoiding interest rates. The farms or tribes or projects are getting what they need up front, our customers are able to see the difference in cost for offsets versus buying year by year. We allow folks to buy that lump sum up front. We're not placing any gamble on the future of renewables.

LIME: What kinds of projects do you do, specifically?

Boucher: We try to seek out projects that are not large and don't have the economy of scale. We concentrate on Native American projects; there are some Alaskan native projects coming along now, two different entities we're working with up there, villages that literally have to be relocated because the lack of sea ice and cold along the shoreline. There are people whose homes have sunk into the so-called permafrost - truly the front line of global warming. We're helping to put up some wind farms to help them replace the diesel that they're almost entirely reliant on now. We're also working with them on some waste-heat recovery projects. There's really no lack of projects to fund - the problem has been building demand for offsets.

We also have several dairy-farm methane projects underway in Pennsylvania, and we're trying to get some going in Vermont - small projects that needed some extra help.

LIME: Dairy-farm methane?

Boucher: The way it works is we divert their stored manure in to a digester - a heated vessel that supports anaerobic digestion of the manure, which creates the methane, which is then captured and fed into a generator, converting that methane to electricity. You can then draw off the waste heat from the generator and use that to preheat or heat water used on the farm. You're avoiding the direct release of methane into the air - methane has something like 25 times the environmental impact of CO2. Often the electricity produced exceeds the needs of the farm, so they can feed it back to the grid.

We see it as helping to add value to these family-owned, environmental farms. We try to concentrate on family farms - like the Schrack family farm, which has struggled to stay in operation. They should be powering up in the next month or so. But we're also working with some of the smaller digester systems, which we think will work with smaller family farms, even around 20 cows. It will help the thousands and thousands of small farms to produce their own power, produce their own heat.

LIME: How about the Native American communities you work with, do they see wind energy as a viable economic strategy for reservations?

Boucher: [When we started,] it was kind of obvious: "Gee, how about adding the extra social value where people could help build economic stability on the reservation?" These are some of the economically poorest reservations, but the richest in terms of wind power - in the Midwest, on the Great Plains.

One of our first projects was a farmer-run project, but because of problems with the local utility, we had to shut it down. So we went to the Rosebud casino [a Native American-run casino in South Dakota]. They had stopped [their windpower program] because of lack of funding. We brought to the table our upfront financing program, and that was that: We were able to create our first large-scale wind project. And getting that first turbine up is still pointed to as what can be done on the reservation.

These tribes view wind farms and other clean energy development as a preferred way to stability, as opposed to expanding any casino programs they have. These are small casinos they have, so they pale in comparison to whatever you might see on the East Coast. They see it as a way for the reservation to participate, building and maintaining the wind farm. And now they're looking to move turbine manufacturing to the reservations. They see these as all good jobs for the reservations.

Take the Rosebud Sioux. Just north of the Nebraska border, they have a very small casino-hotel complex. And the turbine complex is located right next to the casino - they wanted it there for folks traveling by. This is very rural environment, the middle of nowhere. They would much rather see development geared toward renewables and clean power as a way to improve their situation. I've sat in council meetings, I've listened to them struggle over their budget issues - they think this really could make a difference for them.

LIME: It seems there's been a real uptick in awareness of global warming very recently. Has NativeEnergy felt that?

Boucher: There has been a dramatic change in the last 12 months. We were certainly growing with businesses joining us - businesses that we really didn't have to convince of the need for green power. But the outreach to households and individuals has really increased over the last couple of months. With RenewUS, Climate Crisis, the global warming march... We're clearly on a different trajectory than we were even a month ago.