Earlier this month, Charlie Corr, Chief Strategiest, Mimeo.com, stirred up a lot of interest (24 posted comments, several written responses, and more than 2100 page views) with his comments in  An Open Letter to the Industry.  Charlie opened with:

It is increasingly popular to bash the use of paper. The industry is an easy target as everyone uses paper and the presentation of the industry is laughable (think Dunder Mifflin on The Office).

On that same line of thought (although probably not triggered by Charlie's comments), The Stranger, a weekly "alternative" newspaper produced and distributed here in Seattle, recently published an informal analysis comparing reading a digital copy online with reading a printed copy offline. For those of you unfortunate enough to be outside the Stranger's distribution network, it IS a very odd paper, but beloved of folks who want to know what is going on in the local art, music, theatre, and film world. In response to a reader question, Jonathan Golob, science writer for the Stranger, says this:

...on the whole, online is probably greener. (If 100 percent post consumer recycled paper were used, print would be greener.) However, reading is far from your biggest impact on the climate. For example, making a single cheeseburger emits about a thousand grams of carbon into the atmosphere - about two years' worth of paper Stranger reading.

If you want to read more about how he came to his conclusions, the details of his exercise are in Golob's piece, OCD Theater: The Carbon Impact of Reading On Paper or Online. Warning: The Stranger is a publication that will (not may) contain adult language!