Gwynne Dyer

There are 150 new coal-fired plants under construction or already approved and funded in the world, so you can’t really say that we are taking global warming seriously yet. But ...

By Gwynne Dyer “I will never kneel before such a destructive force (as the Taliban),” declared Ashraf Ghani, the soon-to-be-ex-president of Afghanistan. “We will either sit knee-to-knee for real negotiations ...

At first I was going to write about the ‘Arab Problem’, because there is not a single functioning democracy in the Arab world. This week’s presidential coup in Tunisia ...

The extreme weather events of recent weeks have become a further wake-up call ‘Zeitgeist’ is a slippery word. At best it’s just a fancy German way of saying ‘the ...

By Gwynne Dyer Five times in the past two weeks, government soldiers in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces in northern Afghanistan have fled across the border into Tajikistan after clashes with ...

First the ‘heat dome’, with temperatures in the mid-to-high forties Celsius in many parts of western North America for up to a week (49.6°C in Lytton, BC). Then, when the ...

At the recent G7 summit, US president Joe Biden promised to distribute 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines free to the poorer countries by the middle of next year. That’s ...

The hope and/or fear that ‘aliens are among us’ had its heyday in the 1950s but is making a comeback By Gwynne Dyer The silly season has come early ...

It’s not Bretton Woods, but it’s a start. The decision by the finance ministers of the G7 countries to create a global minimum tax rate on corporate profits ...

“I see a huge and growing gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, two weeks ago, but he despaired a bit ...

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki condemned the “hijacking” of the Ryanair jet on the orders of Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko on Sunday, accusing him of a “reprehensible act of ...

The birth rates are falling fast in all the world’s more prosperous countries, but the generation now in their middle years have not yet grasped what that means for ...

By Gwynne Dyer ‘Objective allies’ generally don’t even talk to each other. They don’t have common values, their ultimate goals may be completely incompatible, they often hate each ...

People often compare him to Hitler, yet it’s not only the French who see him in a positive light Napoleon Bonaparte doesn’t come up much in conversation these ...

A tempest in a small teapot this week, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israel of ‘apartheid’. That echoed the judgement of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which ...

You can tuck your head between your knees and kiss your target of ‘not-more-than-1.5-degrees-Celsius-warming’ goodbye. Trump is out and Biden is in, and you will hear a lot of ...

‘Rounding into the home stretch, it’s Italy by a full length, then the United Kingdom, with the United States and Brazil neck and neck…. No, wait. Brazil is making ...

By Gwynne Dyer “If they go, we’ll all have to go. That’s the reality of it,” said a British source about President Joe Biden’s announcement that the ...

We’re safe from Iran’s nuclear weapons which never existed anyway, but what about the others? First, the good news. The United States and Iran had talks in Vienna ...

The non-violent democratic resistance in Myanmar is living through terrible times, but statistics are on its side: most non-violent movements eventually win. But it’s hard to stay non-violent when ...

“We’re waiting on food goods like coconut milk and syrups, some spare parts for motors, we’ve got some fork lift trucks, some Amazon goods on there, all sorts,” ...

By Gwynne Dyer In the early decades of the Cold War, this was the season when Nato defence chiefs would announce their spending plans for the next year, and they ...

The Syrian civil war is ten years old this week, and it’s time to stop it. At least half a million Syrians are dead, a quarter of the pre-war ...

In a letter to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani last weekend, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken insisted that Ghani agree to share power with the Taliban insurgents in a transitional ...