THERE WAS a very odd commentary in the New York Times over the weekend — one which had some interesting relevance right here on the Monterey Peninsula.

Clark Hoyt, the Times’ ombudsman (which is to say, the man who analyzes the paper’s voluminous mistakes for its readers), offered a column Sunday that objected to the content of a fashion supplement the Times recently started publishing 15 times a year. The supplement, T, is “a glossy, unabashed tribute to the good life,” Hoyt noted, and carries enough glitzy advertising to be a “spectacular success” in the otherwise “depressed newspaper world, where revenues are stagnant and layoffs and buyouts are frequent.”

The magazine’s success helps support the Times’ vast, if often misguided, newsgathering operation. But that success also comes at a price to the paper’s reputation, according to Hoyt. A photo spread in the Dec. 2 edition contained semi-nude shots of a 17-year-old model from Texas. The photos of the young lady had a “certain Lolita quality,” and the Times “made a mistake in publishing them,” Hoyt concluded, because T is “delivered with the Sunday Times to more than a million homes” where the newspaper’s readers have “no choice about receiving it” and where some people presumably don’t want their children to see high-fashion photos of a barely clothed teenager.

But having closely followed the New York Times’ alarmist coverage of global warming — wholeheartedly imbued with an Al Gore-style doomsday point of view — the first thing that crossed our minds wasn’t whether anyone cared if a young lady took most of her clothes off to be photographed by the Times. Instead, we wondered how the Times squares its concern over the looming crisis of a warming planet with its decision to initiate yet another paper-hogging section of an already massive, million-copy Sunday edition. No matter how you slice it or spin it, the New York Times is a colossal consumer of dead trees — trees which, if left standing instead of being turned into a medium for sexy, profit-making photos of a Texas teenager, would still be in a forest somewhere soaking up CO2.

Which brings us to the local angle: The Carmel Pine Cone may be the only newspaper in the United States which urges its readers not to read it in print. Instead, we offer the exact same content in a special electronic edition which is available by email or via a download from our website. The electronic edition of The Pine Cone is identical to the printed version, but without (as we have pointed out numerous times since we debuted the electronic edition last spring) the paper mills, energy-hogging printing presses or delivery trucks burning gasoline as they ply the streets every Friday morning. If you care about global warming, please subscribe to our electronic edition by entering your email address on our simple email subscription form.

The New York Times has an elaborate website. But does the paper urge its readers not to buy the printed version? Hardly. Global warming may be an emergency, but the Times doesn’t want it to get in the way of making money. Not their money, anyway.