16 November 2022 Eight Billion and Counting By Gwynne Dyer I must have missed the memo, because there was no newborn baby picked out at random last Tuesday to be the designated eight billionth human being. Perhaps they finally realised how tacky that journalistic device was, or maybe they just got tired of nagging us. …
5 October 2022 Populism: Three Steps Forward; Two-and-a-Half Steps Back By Gwynne Dyer The reports about Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s impending comeback as Brazilian president verged on the ecstatic in the week before last Sunday’s vote. He was after all, fourteen points ahead of his populist rival, incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, in the last …
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11 July 2022 Sri Lanka: A Band of Brothers By Gwynne Dyer “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked (in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’). “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” Sri Lanka is much the same. The James Brothers robbed banks. The Marx brothers made people laugh. The Rajapaksa …
24 January 2022 Shrinking Asia By Gwynne Dyer In the politics of population, the magic number is 2.1. That is ‘replacement level’: if a country’s fertility rate (the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime) is 2.1, then the country’s population will remain level. Above that number, it starts to grow; below …
5 January 2022 The Industrialisation of Space By Gwynne Dyer It will be a bumper year for big space launches to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids, including many manned flights, but the real shocker is the number of satellites and spaceships being launched by private companies. Never mind Elon Musk’s twelve-thousand-small-satellite Starlink programme, which is …
27 December 2021 ‘Nuclear Twilight’: Something Else to Worry About By Gwynne Dyer As a dreadful year draws to an end and the Omicron variant turns out to be less lethal than its predecessors, premature outbreaks of cheerfulness have been spotted in many quarters. As I am under a contractual obligation to keep the readers …
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14 November 2021 COP26: Sharma’s Tears By Gwynne Dyer Closing the two-week COP26 climate summit in Glasgow on Saturday, Alok Sharma, the British president of the 197-country conference, declared “We’ve kept 1.5 (degrees Celsius) within reach, but its pulse is weak.” But he was close to tears several times in his closing remarks. That was …
9 November 2021 COP26: A Mixed Bag By Gwynne Dyer It’s not too early to assess the success or failure of COP26, the climate summit that began in Glasgow on 31 October. The first week, while the heads of state are there, is when all the big promises are announced; the second week is devoted …
27 September 2021 The Quad and the Next Cold War By Gwynne Dyer Never mind AUKUS. It’s the Quad that counts. The creation of an Australia-United Kingdom-United States military alliance last week caused a tempest in a teapot, but the real action was elsewhere. In Washington on Friday the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘Quad’ for short) …
18 May 2021 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 their later years. If they end up needing some sort of assisted living, either at home or in a care home, they will …