I'm on the other side of that issue since until very recently my entire job was figuring out how to get millions of people to stop asking us to send them paper stuff. I'm not entirely sure that "paper usage promotes tree farms" is quite the same thing as "paper usage promotes forests" (but I'm likely biased by my silviculturalist friend telling me so often about how relatively useless tree farms are as ecosystems).

But overall, from the consumer point of view, aren't those arguments essentially a different version of "I bought this pair of shoes I'll never actually wear, but they were 50% off so I actually saved $100?" Sure, paper may not be as bad as you might think, but that doesn't mean it isn't as good as not getting the paper at all (if you have no need for the paper).

I went paperless on all my statements not to save the forest, but to save myself time and limit the clutter in the home office.

Can't you just follow the airline example and slap a fee on printed statements? That sounds like a win-win. Either consumers opt out or it becomes a profit center.

What Alex said. Your defense of paper starts to sound like "free energy" argument. It fails to take into account, for instance, the energy and resources expended to do the farming. The pollution and clearing necessary to build the paper mills that churn the finished product out, then the pollution and energy expended in the actual paper manufacturing process.

Printing may not eat through trees the way most people imagine it does, but it's not resource-free, and reduction of consumption of resources is a good goal to have.

I don't believe that using paper is better than not using paper and that is not the idea behind the campaign I excerpted and linked to. Rather, it is an attempt to get people to realize that paper is not as bad as many like to portray it. Some people think that virgin forests are being clear-cut with abandon so that we can just waste it.

And yes, resources are needed to run the machinery to cultivate/cut the trees, run the paper mills, etc. But resources are also need to generate the electricity to run your computer, make the computer, etc. (so that is not a panacea either). No system is perfect.