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I have sometimes (rarely) seen people promote e-books as "saving the planet" but that's really only the case if you 1) reduce your paper book buying by a significant amount and 2) don't buy a new electronic device to read them on. Let's be realistic; the plastic and rare metals and so on in an e-book reader aren't poofed into existence by the sustainability fairy--they all have environmental costs associated with extracting and processing them, and trashing the broken devices at the end of their lifetimes.
Mind you, I care about the environment, both out of self interest (it's not like we have another life-support system to fall back on when we've torn the crucial piece out of this one) and for its own sake (no, I don't buy the argument that the earth exists for us.) But protecting the environment requires real world data, not guesses that ignore half the environmental costs.
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