As a side note, I find the hyperbole of "killing trees" as a description for "writing checks" a little annoying and uneducated. Does one believe that the energy that makes the Internet possible is free?
Not free, but I would suspect that paying electronically is at least a magnitude less impactful on the environment. That checkbook had to be produced, shipped to the bank, mailed to you, and then the individual check has to get moved around as well.
That wasn't my claim but I don't think the online payments are as low energy as you may believe. In order to allow the Internet to exist such that online payments are so efficient, we must necessarily have all the servers, cables, routers, all the infrastructure, on all the time or otherwise not even a single online payment would go through. That's a lot of air conditioning, alone. So, fine but let's not think online payments use magnitudes less energy by using simplistic calculations.
The energy spent by the humans who have to touch/move/look/process this obsolete, unneeded artifact is more than the energy needed to process a thousand normal deals on the Internet.
