29 August 2002 The Munich Analogy By Gwynne Dyer If you really want to attack somebody and you can’t come up with any convincing reasons, your best tactic is to accuse your opponents of being appeasers who are planning another Munich. Which is why US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has taken to comparing himself to …
21 August 2002 Johannesburg: The Value of Hot Air By Gwynne Dyer It has been calculated that flying all 65,000 delegates to the ten-day World Summit on Environment and Development that opens in Johannesburg on 26 August will dump an extra half-million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — as much as one million …
November 30, 2000 Loopholes Big As SUVs By Gwynne Dyer The Canadians and the Australians were just as bad, really. And the Saudi Arabians were absolutely outrageous: They want the world to compensate them for every barrel of oil they don’t sell if it cuts back on burning fossil fuels to slow global warming. But …
Marijuana July 16, 2001 By Gwynne Dyer The dam burst last weekend. There had been cracks in the concrete of consensus and growing trickles of dissent for some time, but suddenly the issue of legalizing the use of marijuana is on the table in a major country — and an English-speaking one, at that. In …
27 Sep 2000 Columbia and Vietnam By Gwynne Dyer It is customary, when Washington says “Jump,” for British governments to ask “How high?” When they don’t jump, their failure to comply should be treated with the same alarm as when one of the old “pit canaries,” kept in coal mines to detect the build-up of …
16 April 2000 The Dead Walrus on the Breakfast Table By Gwynne Dyer On Friday, the Russian Duma finally ratified START II (the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), six years after it was signed. The next step, rationally, would be to finish the negotiations on the START III treaty, cutting the nuclear warheads on each …
March 9, 2000 Oil Prices in the Sanctions Balance By Gwynne Dyer United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has publicly told Hans von Sponeck, until recently the U.N. official responsible for coordinating humanitarian aid to Iraq, to shut up about the horrendous impact of sanctions on that country so long as he is drawing a U.N. …
8 Feb 2000 Labelling Rule Sets GM Food Exports Back Several Years By Gwynne Dyer Game, set, and match. The Protocol on Biosafety, agreed by 130 countries last Saturday in Montreal afer frantic overtime negotiations, sets the seal on a year that saw genetically modified organisms (GMOs) go from a technology set to sweep the …
January 17, 1999 Is driving on the right right or wrong? by Gwynne Dyer The Romans drove on the left. Why does half the world drive on the left, and the other half on the right? At last, the answer to this burning question is within reach. “We do not know which side of the …
September 26th 1998 The Last Days of the War on Drugs By Gwynne Dyer I noticed the ashtray winking up at me as soon as I sat down at the table. I was having dinner at an auberge at the far end of L’De d’Orleans, and it seemed to be saying: “This is Quebec, where …