JUST A BUCK, TRY YOUR LUCK:

Newsweek has gotten itself into Paul Krugman’s “The miracle of the 1940s” territory here. (i.e., WWII, in which over 50 million people died), or the Grauniad’s classic headline, “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet:”

Genghis Khan, in fact, may have been not just the greatest warrior but the greatest eco-warrior of all time, according to a study by the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Energy. It has concluded that the 13th-century Mongol leader’s bloody advance, laying waste to vast swaths of territory and wiping out entire civilisations en route, may have scrubbed 700m tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere – roughly the quantity of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption – by allowing previously populated and cultivated land to return to carbon-absorbing forest.

Do Newsweek’s writers carry their iPads and laptops in briefcases that resemble Sonny Bono’s in Airplane 2?