by Jurgen Brauer, February 2007
Copyright: J. Brauer. No reproduction without permission.

The Internet saves trees. Or so one often hears. The electronic world makes a paperless world at least hypothetically possible, thereby saving trees. Saving trees supposedly saves the environment, and that is said to be good for all of us.

Who but your friendly neighborhood economist could object to such loftiness? To see why there may be a problem with the "The Internet saves trees" statement, let me rewrite it as follows: "Vegetarianism saves cattle." The statements, although logically equivalent, seem to jar when posed side by side: the Internet saves trees; vegetarianism saves cattle. Somehow saving trees seems more important than saving cattle. And therein lies the rub.

Few people understand that there are no trees "saved" when paper migrates onto the Internet.

Few people understand that there are no trees "saved" when paper migrates onto the Internet. (Nor does it "save" paperwork - another fallacy - as the work still has to be done.) The reason is that no paper company nowadays cuts down virgin forests to convert trees into paper. Instead, paper companies plant forests to convert trees into paper. They do this in exactly the same fashion that ranchers grow cattle to convert meat into hamburgers. Paper companies in essence "plant" paper, just as McDonald's "grows" hamburgers.

Trees are "saved" only insofar as there is no need to plant commercial forests in the first place. This will knock down employment and earnings for thousands of foresters, lumber jacks, chain-saw equipment makers, paper company employees, and sundry others but will make no appreciable difference for "the environment" at all. (An abandond commercial forest would, in time, just become a natural-growth forest and no additional trees are "saved.") It's just as those rural road signs say: "Trees grow jobs" – commercial trees grow commercial jobs, that is. Any tree that is "saved" is "saved" only from the purpose for which it has been grown.

Likewise, if people became vegetarians, the cattle-raising and associated industries would die, and with it thousands of jobs. Any head of cattle "saved" is "saved" only from the purpose for which it has been raised. Unlike paper/trees, however, the environmental effects would be distinctly positive as cattle-raising is bad business, environmentally speaking. It's very energy intensive for example, it requires enormous applications of antibiotics with adverse feedback effects on public health, and it requires that huge swathes of land to be converted into grain fields. The precise figures are disputed (whence I won't cite any); moreover, cattle production is becoming more "efficient" with time, but it nonetheless remains a fact that if all humans ate grain instead of feeding grain to cattle to then eat the cattle, the environment would be better off.

It is not the point of this column to convert people to vegetarianism. Rather, the point is that if "to save trees" means that people want to do something good for the environment then they should stop eating meat before boasting how each new Internet service they invent "saves trees." Perhaps die-hard environmentalists and conservationists should release a rank-ordered list of modified human behavior that would most assist "the environment." My hunch is that driving light-weight cars (less weight, less energy needed to propel the mass) and consuming less meat (and fish, too) would rank far, far higher on the list than increased use of the Internet!

The "save trees" sentiment reminds me of those signs in hotels: drop linen and towels on the floor and they will be changed daily but the hotel urges you to "save the environment" by reusing your sheets and towels. Don't get me wrong: I believe that reduce, reuse, recylce is wonderful - and I much practice it myself - but in terms of big-impact priorities, I'd say we are helping the hotels cut costs more than we are helping the environment.

Reusing your linen and using the Internet are cheap, conscience-soothing pallatives (nay, sedatives!) for our minds. If you really care about the environment, you'd actually change your behavior. But that's costly!