I've often assumed that I was saving a bunch of trees and keeping my carbon footprint down by using online versions of newspapers and almost anything else I could get my hands on. On the flip side, some environmental contrarians have argued that e-versions of print sources actually cause more harm than the original.
This surprised me a lot. But the article is a little short on persuasive reasoning. The main grist for the argument is that the servers used to run the paper use a lot of electricity in a year, and that electricity requires fuel that inevitably adds CO2 to the atmosphere. On the flip side even though newspaper print requires a lot of trees to be cut down, the trees themselves retain a lot of their carbon becasue the newsprint is either recycled or buried at a landfill. Eventually, it just becomes a fossil fuel. This assumes that the amount of newsprint used to start barbeque fires is negligible.
More pointedly. It doesn't take into account the power needed to run printing presses in a year, or the amount of people who use the servers to get their online NYTimes in comparison to the print version, or the amount of waste in harvested trees for newsprint.