France has a carbon tax

Who knew? France now has a carbon tax:

The year it didn't happen - Winnipeg Free Press - Gwynne Dyer

... France became the largest economy to impose a carbon tax on individuals and businesses using coal, gas or oil, with the explicit intention of changing people's patterns of energy use. The tax is US$24 per tonne of emissions now, but it will rise over the years...

Go France!

This is the first time I can remember France leading on anything. It certainly didn't get much coverage in the US, though that's hardly surprising. What could be less popular in America than global warming + taxes + France?

Happily, Gwynne Dyer posts his article notices on Twitter (see also) so I look forward to hearing more news that's forbidden in America.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

My Gwynne Dyer feed - at last

Gwynne Dyer is a curmudgeonly military historian journalist. He's 66, I think I read him when I was a kid in Montreal. You can't read him there any more, Conrad Black owns much of Canada's press and he doesn't like Dyer.

I've followed him for years, but he's remained resolutely stuck in the early 1990s. His web articles are ".txt", not ".html". Feeds are impossibly futuristic for Dyer, which is a problem since he publishes erratically.

I tried monitoring him with ChangeDetection and Page2RSS and Feedity, but not Dappit. They were all finicky, and nothing worked for long. I finally gave up last year.

Today, though, Dyer 2010 has a Google generated feed: http://www.google.com/notificationservice/webchanges/webfeeds/3585261901611337376

All you need to do to get a feed like this is to put a page URL into the Google Reader "Add a Subscription box". If GR can't find a feed, it creates one.

It doesn't show anything yet because I just created it. It won't show anything until Dyer posts something. For now though I see quite a few 2009 and 2010 articles I can catch up on. I'll use the "Note in Reader" function to comment on those I like, you can get a feed on my Google Reader items here: My Google Reader Shared items (feed).

Update: Oops. "note in reader" doesn't work with .txt pages.

Update 3/13/10: The Google Feed isn't working. I suspect they can't process .txt files served up by http! An anonymous commenter suggests using the NZ Herald Feed for Dyer and reveals he has a twitter feed as well. I'll try both.

Incidentally, most of my posts show up when I do a Google search scoped to kateva.org. This one doesn't. Curious.

Dyer - 5 new articles

Five more from Dyer (apologies for formatting):

The Cuban Revolution at Fifty

Thieves' Quarrel

Israeli Tail, American Dog (2)

SWISH, Obama and the Terrorists

Multi-racial Britain

Dyer - the last articles of 2008

It's been a while, but Dyer has 5 new 2008 articles:

• November 27 Terrorism is Marginal
• December 2 Four Harsh Truths about Climate Change: it's too late. We're in big trouble, climate engineering better work.
• December 6 Small Earthquake in Canada, Not Many Hurt: the political crisis is small stuff, Canada is in good shape
• December 9 Global Zero: eliminating nuclear weapons
• December 14 The Old Thailand Returns (this has a bad link, should be fixed soon. Go to the site to find it.)
  

If he follows past practices he'll have a 2009 page up soon -- there's nothing there yet. I'll have to edit my Page2RSS monitor to track that new page.

Gwynne Dyer: newly posted

Six, all at once. I'm curious to what he says about Obama.

October 24 Perfidious Albion
October 30 Obama: The Limits of Power
November 4 China: Taiwan: Porcupines On A First Date
November 7 The Threat of Green Obama
November 13 Realism in Ukraine
November 14 Never Waste a Crisis

Why we have constitutions - a reminder

Dyer has 4-6 new articles up. For example ..

Civil Liberties

...a majority of the British public, given the right lead by the gutter press, would probably also support 90-day detention, waterboarding of suspects, 180-day detention, torture of their relatives, 360-day detention, and summary execution of detainees. Provided they were Muslim, of course. But democratic countries have laws and constitutions precisely to fend off this kind of ignorant populism....

By the vote of a single supreme court justice we still have a working constitution in America.

McCain is upset. He doesn't want a constitution.

Remember that.

Dyer: Peak Oil means Peak Sweet Crude only

I'm impressed by Dyer's reasoning.

Peak Oil, he tells us, is only the end of the good stuff. There's lots of CO2 producing bad stuff, even if we bake and tear the planet to get to it.

Dyer, prections ...

... the recession is likely to drive the demand for oil down far enough to bring the price back down to $100 before long, or even to $85-90. Then in 2009-2010, as the "old rich" economies recover, it will go back up, probably to the $130-$150 range....

...the price of oil will probably stay well about $100 for most of the time in 2010-2015. But it won't hit $200, because there will be a steep rise in the supply of non-conventional oil from tar sands, oil shales, and other sources of "heavy oil."...

...In the still longer run -- the 2030s and beyond -- the demand for oil will probably fall even further, and with it the price. How do we know that? Because if it hasn't fallen due to a deliberate switch away from fossil fuels, then global warming will gain such momentum that entire countries are falling into chaos instead. There is more than one way to cut demand...

This would mean that, contrary to my post of May 12, oil and gasoline prices aren't necessarily going to keep rising at 10-15% per year. There's a natural ceiling of $200 out around 2015. Beyond that we probably melt Greenland, and the ensuing global chaos drops the price of oil.

Hmm. I'm glad I'm waiting for August before I make my "official" prediction!

Dyer - new articles (now via Page2RSS)

I've been subscribing to Gwynne Dyer's stubbornly archaic article distribution system via ChangeDetection.com and Page2RSS.

Today both of them notified me of a change -- the incorporation of seven new articles:

• April 23 Americans Helping Israel
• April 28 Oil Prices: Another Prediction
• May 02 Two Takes on Terrorism
• May 04 Why Did the (Z) Chicken Cross the Road?
• May 07 President Obama
• May 09 Why is Burma Like That?
• May 14 Pakistan: Politicians, Judges and a General

The beauty of Page2RSS is I get the notification and a summary of the changes. In this case I received all seven links in the generated RSS post. It was trivial to reformat them as above. If it keeps working I'll turn off ChangeDetection and stick with Page2RSS.

Now to read the articles ...

Update 5/18/2008: A comment suggested Feedity as another RSS source for a static page. They generate a complete feed as per this example for Dyer: http://feedity.com/rss.aspx/gwynnedyer-com/UVBbVFU. So now I'll compare Feedity to Page2RSS.

Dyer - 4 new articles

Dyer has 4 new articles out:

• Maliki blinked: Sadr came out ahead, but it doesn't matter anyway. Soon America will leave and Iraq will be forgotten.
• Zimbabwe: I'd skip this one, nothing much in it.
• Olympics: The running of the torch was a Hitler invention. (!) Look for trouble in India, and mockery in Australia.
• Nepal: The Maoists won the election.
• Berlusconi; The best of this batch, see below ...

For example:

http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Berlusconi%20Is%20Back.txt

...To elect Berlusconi once, as Oscar Wilde might have put it, may be regarded as a misfortune. To elect him twice looks like carelessness. But to elect him THREE TIMES is beyond a joke, for he is the most transparent fraud to have held high public office in a major European country since the Second World War. He even makes the late Boris Yeltsin look serious and competent by comparison...

...

My country re-elected George Bush, so I have some sympathy for the shame and horror intelligent Italians must feel today. Between Italy electing Berlusconi, and Nepal electing Maoists terrorists, Democracy is looking a bit peaked.

Gwynne Dyer: four new essays

The historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer has four new essays online:

• Pakistan: Bhutto's assassination voided any deals with Musharraff and thus ended his power. Dyer detects a faint ray of hope.
  
• Tibet: China will crush the uprising just as they did in 1959, Olympics or no Olympics. China has been uncharacteristically restrained up to this point.
  
• Iraq: Iraq's ethnic partitioning will aid recovery. Even Lebanon stopped fighting. Was it worth it? We'll never know.
  
• Abkhazia: Dyer makes a peculiar argument that Russia actually likes International law and the UN, and therefore won't truly advance Abhkazian separation from Georgia. I have to admit it's a novel idea! That never would have occurred to me.
  

Gwynne Dyer: Kosovo, Climate Change, US Defense budget

My Dyer Detector fired today. Sure nuff, he's added three high value essays:

• Kosovo update: Independence pending in next few weeks
• America's half-trillion dollar defense budget is not driven by the 'war on terror', it's in anticipation of resource and climate conflicts with China
  

and a favorite of his -- Climate change:

Over the past few weeks, in several countries, I have interviewed a couple of dozen senior scientists,government officials and think-tank specialists whose job is to think about climate change on a daily basis. And NOT ONE of them believes the forecasts on global warming issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
just last year. They think things are moving much faster than that.

The IPCC's predictions in the 2007 report were frightening enough. Across the six scenarios it considered, it predicted "best estimate" rises in average global temperature of between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius (3.2 and 7.2 degrees F) by the end of the 21st century, with a maximum change of 6.4 degrees Celsius (11.5 degrees F) in the "high scenario". But the thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers that the IPCC examined in order to reach those conclusions dated from no later than early 2006, and most relied on data from several years before that.

It could not be otherwise, but it means that the IPCC report took no notice of recent indications that the warming has accelerated dramatically. While it was being written, for example, we were still talking about the possibility of the Arctic Ocean being ice-free in late summer by 2042. Now it's 2013.

Nor did the IPCC report attempt to incorporate any of the "feedback" phenomena that are suspected of being responsible for speeding up the heating, like the release of methane from thawing permafrost. Worst of all, there is now a fear that the "carbon sinks" are failing, and in particular that the oceans, which normally absorb half of the carbon dioxide that is produced each year, are losing their ability to do so.

Dyer points out the five degree average increase includes cool supra-ocean air, so the inland increase is rather higher than five degrees.

Dyer: six articles for 2008

Gwynne Dyer 2008 has new essays on Kenya, Thailand, the papacy, the Tata Motor Nano, the Middle East and, of course, the US.

As has been true for years, his are probably the most read pages on the net that are strictly .txt files with hard coded line wrap. Reminds me of Gopher. No feeds of course!

This year he's introduced tables (!) to hold his article links, which make it impossibly tedious to copy direct links to the set of recent articles articles.

He is a character, no doubt. All the same he's a very insightful writer. Alas the .txt format means it's tedious to quote directly from his writings.

Hmm. You don't suppose that's the point?

Five by Dyer: two on Oil

Five from Gwynne Dyer

Oct 29 The Indo-US Alliance: The Wheels Fall Off
Nov 2 Telling the Truth about Oil
Nov 8 After Peak Oil
Nov 13 Pakistan Scenarios
Nov 18 Australia's Climate Change Election

All interesting, as usual.

Dyer on why Bush invaded Iraq - not the oil

Dyer is no fan of George Bush's rule. In a recent essay, however, he disparages the common belief that Cheney/Bush invaded Iraq to protect the west's oil supply. So what was the reason?

... So why did they invade Iraq, in the end? One motive was certainly the desire for permanent American military bases in the Gulf from which the United States could, at need, stop oil flowing to China. The strategic community in Washington has identified China as America's new strategic rival, and it is becoming more and more vulnerable to interference with its oil imports. (Those 'enduring bases' are still being built in Iraq.) But that is not a big enough reason to explain what happened. I have written tens of thousands of words on the Bush administration's motives for invading Iraq, but in the end I do not know why they did it. I suspect that they don't, either. It just seemed like a neat idea at the time...

More Dyer essays: 8/20-9/17 2007

More Dyer essays:

Gwynne Dyer: 2007

August 20 British Retreat From Iraq
August 27 Sarkozy: The Hyper-President
August 30 Islam and the Idiotic Autocrats
Sept 4 Extreme Climate and Extreme Politics
Sept 6 Terrorism: Lessons from Germany
Sept 10 Marking Time
Sept 17 It's All About Oil

Gwynne Dyer - 9 essays - July through Aug 16 2007

Dyer has 9 new ones.

1. Bangladesh: When Democracy Goes Bad
2. The Turkish Election
3. Libya, Bulgarians and Lockerbie
4. Oil: $100 a Barrel -- or $200?
5. Zimbabwe Meltdown
6. Pakistan: Forecasts of Disaster
7. Arctic Scramble
8. Slow Forward
9. "Boys Go To Baghdad..."

I'm convinced now he'll never add a syndication feed or otherwise update the web site. I think his may be the last site in the world serving "pages" as .txt files. I assume that's not a clever technique to prevent blogging/quoting, but you never know -- he may be curmudgeonly, but he's a very good writer.

Anyway, I've added a Dyer tag to Gordon's Notes -- if Blogger adds tag-specific RSS it will become a de facto Dyer feed.

Dyer: Five new essays

Dyer has five new ones:

2007

July 1 Perspectives on Terrorism
July 3 The United States of Africa
July 6 The End of Cheap Food
July 10 The New York Times vs. Reality
July 14 North Korea: Five Wasted Years

I'm puzzled Dyer doesn't have a larger blog profile. It's true that his web technology is medieval, but I suspect it's simply a lack of big name attention. Now if Brad were to start reading Dyer ...

The good news on global warming: not enough fuel

Dyer recently wrote of the CO2 "game of chicken" -- China and India vs. the post-industrial world in a race to see who can fry the world first.

FuturePundit (warning, he is irrational about global warming) posts a more optimistic view -- we can't fry the world because we don't have enough coal. His writing is referring to this blog post. If you buy this argument we can only roast the world a bit.

That's the most optimistic thing I've read all week. Of course I suspect it's not true, but one can dream ...

Four new Dyer essays

Dyer 2007

June 14 The Islamic Republic of Gaza
June 18 Kosovo and the Law
June 21 China's Shoes
June 23 The Middle East After Iraq

Some points of interest from this series:

• In 2006 China emitted 8% more CO2 than the US
• Cement and coal are the two reasons China puts out far more CO2 per capita than it should
• China, India and the US are playing a monstrous game of "chicken" on CO2 emissions
• Dyer on Israel's future: "Israel faces another generation of confrontation and quite possibly of war, and the Palestinians face another generation of military occupation. Significant chunks of the Arab world face Islamist revolutions that would bring more poverty and a new kind of oppression. It is a mess, and it's too late to fix it.
• Dyer is as pessimistic about Kosovo as he is about Israel, and he regrets ever supporting the US attack on Serbia. He sees it as a "precedent" for the invasion of Iraq. I think he's overestimating how much "precedent" Cheney/Bush needed.

Of the four essays the China one is by far the best and the Kosovo essay the weakest.

Dyer - four new essays

Dyer has four new essays up. Enjoy.

Articles 2007
May 31 The War of Six Days and Forty Years
June 4 Don't Mention the Warming (G8 and Climate Change)
June 8 Calling the BMD Bluff
June 11 India: The Price of Choice

He takes PayPal donations, but needs to adopt Amazon instead. I don't do PayPal.