Are dead-tree magazines good or bad for the climate?
Companies are increasingly being asked to calculate their carbon footprint, and if they’re public, publish it. Good idea? Perhaps. But it’s harder than you might think, and the results can sometimes be counterintuitive. Take my own industry, magazine publishing. Surely dead-tree media is bad for the climate, and web media is good, right? Well, not necessarily.
Let’s look at the total carbon cycle. The thing we’re trying to do when combating climate change is to decrease the…
