NYT tries to justify its carbon footprint
Posted by Clyde Middleton
on Apr 19 2009 Filed under Politics.
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This article is uproariously funny. The question posed is this: Is a printed newspaper more eco-friendly than viewing the same news online?
Let’s just cut to the chase scene here. First, my computer exists. I read news online. Adding a few articles from another news site and taxing some server with (useless) overhead is one side of the scale. Killing trees and soybeans, and belching out pollution from mill to ink manufacturer to press to delivery truck to landfill is the other side of the scale.
Are liberals so deluded as to think they can win this argument? Add up the carbon from the gasoline- or diesel-powered delivery trucks alone, and I am sure they lose. Ask a tree how it feels about dying for self-serving liberal op-eds and I am sure the argument is won again. Better yet, ask the spotted owl that just lost its home and has to move to a Kmart sign that is lit 24/7. And, hey, aren’t people starving somewhere on Earth? Where does the NYT get off scoffing up all the soybeans for ink to tell us people are starving? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just give those starving people the soybeans to begin with?
Let’s see what they have to say for themselves. This oughta be rich.
The article begins:
For those of us who cherish the habit of a printed newspaper over coffee each morning, …
Oh, just wait! I cherished the habit of starting the day off with a cigarette and coffee. Doesn’t make it whimsical to reflect upon and then premise an argument upon it. Do you know how hot coffee strips the throat of its protective covering, thus allowing the poisons in the cigarette smoke to do their nasty work in hyper-speed to advance the cause of throat cancer? You ever look at the carbon footprint of a chemo patient? Liberals suck at constructing arguments. All emotion.
Onward. The NYT tells us that Marriott Hotels are making guest papers optional. The Marriott statement:
“Based on preliminary data, the company projects that newspaper distribution will be reduced by about 50,000 papers daily or 13 million papers annually, thereby avoiding 10,350 tons of carbon emissions.”
One hotel chain can save us that much carbon? I stood up and did that Irish line-dancing thing with my border collie. I think I offended him.
Fifty thousand newspapers is – like 50 dead lawyers in a well (I can write that because I am one) – a good start. Let’s not take the NYT bait. Imagine there’s no newspapers. It’s easy if you try. How many newspapers do we print? For some reason Editor & Publisher cites 2003 data as the most recent. It’s as good as any, I guess. To be honest, the only thing I enjoy about print news is throwing it in the garbage. Ranks right up there with the Publisher’s Clearinghouse and AARP spam that fills the mailbox at the end of my driveway.
In 2003, we printed 55 million newspapers for six days a week, and then 58.5 million on Sundays. That’s – hold your breath and put your cigarette and coffee down – 20 billion newspapers a year.
Marriott instructs us above that 1 million papers vomits 796 tons of carbon a year. Applying that to the entire US newspaper industry, we get 16,083,900 tons of carbon a year.
Beef and lamb spew 16 tons of carbon per ton of meat (I‘m a vegetarian because I don’t like what meat does to the inside of me, specifically my colon; I could not care less about what it does outside of me – stop by the house and I’ll gladly make you a steak on the grill). Anyway, by mercy killing the American newspaper industry, we could free up carbon credits for 1 million more tons of cows and sheep in ready-to-cook packaging. That’s 2.2 billion pounds of meat, or 5.9 billion 6-ounce servings. Do you realize the impact on global hunger? This is astounding. Now, that’s change I can believe in!
Back the NYT. They dismiss Marriott’s move thusly:
There are plenty of reasons to believe that noting the carbon savings was a specious move on Marriott’s part — a bit of green spin on an otherwise straightforward cost-cutting measure.
No, the “plenty of reasons” are backed up by nothing. It’s just a dismissal of an eco-friendly move by a large corporation. How degrading to just be dismissed.
Giving us a little substance, the NYT writes:
One study, published in 2004, compared the cradle-to-grave environmental implications of reading The New York Times the old-fashioned way with reading it on a personal digital assistant, or PDA. The conclusion: Receiving the news on a PDA results in big reductions in the release of carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen and sulfur oxides.
Not certain that consumers were reading newspapers on PDAs as much as browsing the news using computers and laptops, I asked Michael W. Toffel, a co-author of that study and a fellow at Harvard University’s environmental economics program, whether he had crunched the numbers.
He had not, but in venturing a guess, Mr. Toffel said it was likely that computers would still win an environmental showdown with newsprint.
“Paper manufacturing and distribution is so water- and energy-intense,” he said. “I think it would be hard to overcome that.”
I’d like to read that study. Do they link it? Of course not. You see, that’s the fundamental misunderstanding of these clowns. One needs to optimize the environment in which one is placed. So when putting an article with an alleged fact on the net, one must provide a link to the source. Just because you say – well, perhaps precisely because you say it – doesn’t make it fact. We want to be able to investigate on our own. Part of it is verifying, yes, because any step removed from fact introduces opinion. But another significant part of it is who we are: We actually like perusing source data. It’s fun! We learn things! It just so happens to be things outside your control, and that, I suspect, is the issue. Am I right or am I right?
So, the study. A quick Google search, and here is a quick summary. The opening paragraph:
According to a pair of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, switching from paper newspapers to electronic versions on personal digital assistants (PDAs) leads to less CO2, NOx, and SOx emissions. The results are based on the environmental impact of several components of newspaper production, including paper, ink, and delivery trucks. For perspective, a year’s worth of The New York Times weighs approximately 225 kilograms and requires approximately 23,000 liters of water to produce. In contrast to this, the researchers show using a PDA requires 24 kilowatthours and less than 390 L of water per year. Based on their findings, the researchers conjecture that if one out of every four newspapers were read online instead of in print, it would reduce CO2 emissions by 6–10 billion kg.
The full report is here.
I’m not going to do the math to compare their estimated savings to those calculated above. If there’s a difference, let Marriott and Dr. Toffel sort it out. But look at all the water the NYT sucks up! Don’t we see ads on television where good folks traipse through under-developed regions changing lives by digging wells?
Not satisfied with the result, the NYT goes to another study “published in 2007 out of the KTH Center for Sustainable Communications in Stockholm.” No, not linked. This is why the NYT’s circulation is plummeting (HuffPo link – couldn’t resist).
NYT’s summary:
Time spent online, for instance, mattered. So, too, did the locale. In the Swedish market alone, reading the news online for 10 minutes, or even for 30 minutes, or using the tablet reader, resulted in lower CO2 emissions than reading a physical newspaper.
In the wider European market, however, things were different. Using the tablet or reading online for just 10 minutes generated less CO2 than the printed product. But when the time spent reading online was increased to 30 minutes, the printed product proved more eco-friendly.
Why different in the “wider European market”?
About two-thirds of Sweden’s energy, for example, comes from nuclear or hydropower — both of which produce negligible carbon dioxide emissions. That means using electricity to read the news online there is less costly in climate terms.
Just spit my coffee! Now, the NYT is pro-nuclear power? Whew. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Running out of studies, the NYT cites some readers:
Back at the Green Inc. blog, readers of varying pedigree continue to argue the topic. “The carbon content of a newspaper represents carbon dioxide that has been removed from the atmosphere,” wroteGeoffrey A. Landis, a scientist at NASA’s John Glenn Research Center. “The carbon footprint of a newspaper is negative.”
Countered Brad, another reader, who noted that the energy used to harvest the paper and deliver it to doorsteps must be accounted for: “A tree does not magically transform itself into a newspaper.”
How sad.
I vote for more meat, more water, less carbon. Let’s nourish the world – kill the American newspaper industry!
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