Green Wombat

Wind farm project in the Native American village of Kasigluk, Alaska

How much does it cost to make your company carbon neutral? In the case of Salesforce.com (CRM), the bill for offsetting the greenhouse gases produced by its corporate operations in 2006 comes to $126,000, or about $6.40 per ton of carbon emitted. The Web-based software company today announced Earthforce, an initiative to neutralize its contribution to global warming by funding alternative energy and forest conservation projects. Salesforce.com worked with the non-profit Cool Air Cool Planet and Native Energy, a  Native American owned renewable energy company, to calculate that the San Francisco tech company's data centers, offices and corporate travel produced about 19,700 tons of carbon last year. To compensate, the company's Salesforce.com Foundation will help finance Native Energy wind farm projects in Alaska and South Dakota, a family farm wind farm, and a methane digester to produce electricity from cow manure - cower power - at a family-owned dairy farm. Salesforce.com will also work with Conservation International to preserve the threatened but ecologically rich Makira rain forest in Madagascar. The idea: the amount of renewable energy produced by the wind farms and methane digester and the carbon absorbed by the rain forest will zero-out the carbon produced by Salesforce.com's operations. According to Native Energy, an independent audit is conducted to ensure the offsets purchased result in actual emission reductions. "We feel it's an important first step for us to take," Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com's VP for corporate strategy, told Green Wombat. "We wanted to be able to tell our customers that when you partner with Salesforce you’re not contributing to global warming." He acknowledged that such programs are no longer just about green marketing. "Increasingly, smart customers are going to ask the question" about greenhouse gas emissions "and we want to have the answers for them," says Francis. Carbon offset programs are "quickly moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have." But with even old-line tech giants such as Dell (DELL) promoting programs like "Plant a Tree for Me,"  carbon-savvy customers are next going to be asking companies what they're doing to directly reduce greenhouse gas emissions - such as using energy-efficient servers and solar power and trading in gas hogs in their vehicle fleets for hybrids.