SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT BY BANNING BOOKS! Publication would be on the Internet instead.

Er, but actually, aren’t all those unread books a decent form of carbon sequestration?

Speaking of which, here’s my carbon-credit scheme: Buy carbon credits from me, and I’ll subscribe to newspapers in appropriate quantity, then deposit them unread into landfills where they’ll remain unchanged for centuries at least. The beauty is that this will keep journalists, whose jobs are currently in danger, employed. And newspapers will suck up to me for my circulation-enhancing patronage, giving me immense media power. When people say “cancel my subscription!” they don’t care. But “cancel my 100,000 subscriptions” — well, that’s different . . . .

There must be a downside to this idea somewhere — the germ of it came in a reader email a while ago that I can’t find now — but I’m not seeing it. And heck, it would be more honest than a lot of the carbon-credit schemes out there.

UPDATE: I could do something similar by paying a bounty for people’s old Dexes. Or whatever.