Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 22 May 2026
A finding published this week in Anthropocene Magazine quantifies something solar engineers have suspected but never pinned down at scale: pollution from coal-fired power plants is cancelling out roughly one-third of every year's new solar capacity worldwide. The mechanism is straightforward — particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides scatter and absorb sunlight before it reaches photovoltaic panels. The dirtier the air, the less electricity each panel generates. In regions where coal and solar coexist most densely — northern India, eastern China, parts of Southeast Asia and Poland — the losses are even steeper.
The irony is structural, not incidental. The countries investing most aggressively in solar are often the same ones still commissioning coal plants to cover baseload demand during the transition. China added more solar capacity than any nation in history last year, but it also led the world in new coal-plant construction. India is on a similar dual track. The result is a quiet efficiency tax: billions of dollars in solar hardware underperforming because the sky above it is opaque.
This is not a modelling exercise about 2050. It is happening on rooftops and in solar farms right now. A panel rated at 400 watts in a test lab in Arizona does not produce 400 watts in Uttar Pradesh when the air quality index sits above 200. Bankable solar yields — the numbers that underpin project finance — assume a certain level of irradiance. If that irradiance is systematically lower because of coal pollution, internal rates of return shrink, payback periods lengthen, and the financial case for solar in precisely the markets that need it most gets quietly undermined.
The fix, as Anthropocene notes, is obvious: accelerate coal phase-out. But the politics are anything but obvious. Coal employs millions, anchors regional economies, and provides the dispatchable power that grid operators rely on when the sun sets or clouds gather. Telling a provincial energy minister in Jharkhand or Shanxi to shut coal plants faster so that solar panels work better is a circular argument that lands poorly in political reality.
What makes this finding genuinely important is that it reframes the energy transition debate. Climate advocates have long argued for coal phase-out on emissions grounds. Now there is a direct economic argument: your coal plants are degrading the performance of your solar plants. The two investments are not parallel — they are adversarial. Every dollar spent on new coal infrastructure actively diminishes the return on every dollar spent on solar infrastructure in the same airshed.
For investors, the implications ripple outward. Solar project developers operating in high-pollution geographies may need to discount their yield projections. Insurance and warranty products tied to solar output may need repricing. And the emerging market green bond universe — already under scrutiny for greenwashing — faces a new credibility question: are the projected clean-energy outputs realistic if the air itself is dirty?
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 21 May 2026
Now — Solar finance models need a pollution discount: Project developers and their bankers use satellite irradiance data to model expected output over a panel's 25-year life. But most models treat air quality as a static background variable, not a dynamic one linked to nearby fossil-fuel infrastructure. The Anthropocene findings suggest that in coal-heavy regions, actual yields may be systematically overstated. Lenders financing solar in India, China, Vietnam and Poland should be asking whether their base cases account for the coal next door.
Soon — Coal phase-out gets a new constituency: Until now, the loudest voices for coal retirement have been climate campaigners and health advocates. This research hands a megaphone to a different group: solar asset owners. If you own a 500-megawatt solar farm downwind from a coal complex, your revenue is being suppressed by your neighbour's emissions. Expect solar industry lobbying to merge with clean-air advocacy in markets like India and Indonesia within the next two years, creating unusual political coalitions.
Later — Waymo's flood fiasco exposes autonomy's weather ceiling: Waymo has now suspended its robotaxi service in four American cities after its vehicles repeatedly drove into flooded roads. The pauses — in Atlanta, San Antonio and beyond — reveal a fundamental limitation that the autonomous vehicle industry has been slow to confront: self-driving systems trained overwhelmingly on fair-weather data fail when the physical world deviates from their expectations. Flooded intersections do not look like normal intersections to a camera or a lidar array. The water obscures lane markings, alters surface reflectivity, and hides hazards beneath its surface. A human driver sees standing water and stops. Waymo's cars, in multiple documented cases, drove straight in. The long-term implication is regulatory. If autonomous vehicles cannot handle weather events that are becoming more frequent due to climate change, cities will face a choice: either restrict AV operations during adverse conditions — undermining the always-on convenience that is the industry's core value proposition — or demand that companies prove all-weather competence before receiving operating permits. Expect municipal regulators, not federal ones, to draw the first hard lines. Sources: Anthropocene Magazine · TechCrunch · 21 May 2026 ---
China's Pinglu Canal — a 134-kilometre waterway linking Nanning to the Gulf of Tonkin — has entered final construction and will begin trial operations as early as September, months ahead of plan. The first route will connect China's interior to the free-trade port of Hainan, bypassing the congested and strategically vulnerable Strait of Malacca. It is China's most ambitious waterway project in centuries, designed to give its southern provinces direct sea access and reshape trade logistics across mainland Southeast Asia. Vietnam, already watching Chinese infrastructure creep closer to its northern border, will not be celebrating. Source: South China Morning Post · 21 May 2026
Months into the unexplained public absence of Mojtaba Khamenei — who succeeded his father as Iran's supreme leader — officials in Tehran are crafting narratives that he is well and governing. But the silence is conspicuous. No verified public appearances, no live addresses. The vacuum raises succession anxieties inside the clerical establishment and complicates US-Iran nuclear talks at a moment when both sides have signalled willingness to negotiate. A regime that depends on the aura of a supreme guide cannot afford an invisible one for long. Source: Financial Times · 21 May 2026
The Antarctic Treaty consultative meeting in Hiroshima ended this week without reaching any accord, with Japan's presiding ambassador openly acknowledging that geopolitical rifts — primarily between Russia and Western nations — had derailed negotiations. The Treaty, signed in 1959, has kept Antarctica demilitarised and open for science for over six decades. Its erosion would not just affect penguin researchers; it would open questions about territorial claims, mineral rights, and military activity on the last ungoverned continent. Source: The Japan Times · 21 May 2026
North Carolina has filed suit against Vietnamese electric vehicle maker VinFast, alleging the company breached agreements tied to a planned EV and battery manufacturing facility and seeking to reclaim the project site. VinFast had promised thousands of jobs and billions in investment. The case is a cautionary tale for US states competing to attract foreign EV manufacturers with lavish incentive packages — and for VinFast's ambitions to become a serious player outside Southeast Asia. Source: Bloomberg · 21 May 2026
In a surreal diplomatic gesture, the Venezuelan government authorised the US Embassy in Caracas to conduct an evacuation drill this Saturday, including controlled overflights of two American aircraft over the capital. The exercise comes amid deepening US-Venezuela tensions after Washington's indictment of Raúl Castro — Cuba's former leader and Caracas's closest ideological ally. That Maduro's government is permitting American military aircraft over its airspace, even for a drill, suggests back-channel communication is more active than the rhetoric implies. Source: Mercopress · 21 May 2026
Malaysian police arrested 35 Chinese nationals operating from a rented bungalow in upmarket Johor, running AI-powered job scams targeting victims in Spain. The syndicate used artificial intelligence and pre-built language templates to communicate convincingly in Spanish — a new evolution in cross-continental fraud. The operation illustrates how AI has collapsed the language barrier that once limited scam operations to linguistic neighbours, turning any country with cheap rent and internet access into a launchpad for global fraud. Source: South China Morning Post · 21 May 2026
Scientists now estimate an 80 per cent chance of El Niño developing by July, with early data suggesting it could be unusually strong. Coral researchers are expressing open dread: a powerful El Niño following recent mass bleaching events could push already stressed reef systems past recovery thresholds. On land, the implications range from drought in Australia and Southeast Asia to flooding in South America — a global weather disruption arriving just as commodity markets are already strained by geopolitical turmoil. Source: Straits Times · 21 May 2026
Carlo Petrini, the Italian activist who founded the Slow Food movement in 1986 as a protest against a McDonald's opening near the Spanish Steps in Rome, died Thursday in Bra, Italy. What began as a manifesto for pleasure and tradition became a global network spanning 160 countries, reshaping how millions think about food systems, biodiversity and local agriculture. Petrini proved that a movement rooted in conviviality — not guilt — could alter industrial food policy. He leaves behind an organisation and an idea that outlived him long before he died. Source: Folha de São Paulo · 21 May 2026 ---
Africa's largest tech economies — Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt — are pushing hard to own their artificial intelligence future. The problem, as Rest of World reported this week, is stark: the infrastructure they need still belongs to Big Tech. Cloud servers sit in Dublin and Virginia. Training data flows through cables owned by American and Chinese companies. The algorithms shaping African commerce, health systems and governance were built by people who have never set foot on the continent.
But the pushback is real and growing. Across Lagos, Nairobi and Cape Town, a new generation of AI builders is refusing to accept that sovereignty means only flags and anthems. They want computational sovereignty — the ability to train models on local languages, local data, local problems, without routing everything through Silicon Valley's servers and San Francisco's values.
The obstacles are immense. Power is unreliable. Capital is scarce. Talent gets poached. And the big cloud providers offer free tiers and academic credits that create dependency disguised as generosity. It is a pattern older than computing itself: the infrastructure gift that becomes the infrastructure trap.
What makes this story worth watching is not the David-versus-Goliath framing. It is the specificity of the ambition. These are not people who want to build a generic "African ChatGPT." They want models that understand Yoruba irony, Swahili medical terminology, South African legal precedent. They want AI that works for a nurse in Mombasa, not just a programmer in Mountain View.
The technical workarounds are inventive. Smaller models trained on curated local datasets rather than brute-force internet scrapes. Edge computing that reduces dependence on distant data centres. Open-source frameworks modified for low-bandwidth environments. It is unglamorous, painstaking work — and it is precisely the kind of building that matters.
The bet is that in ten years, the AI systems that actually function in African contexts will be the ones built by people who understand those contexts. Not imported. Not adapted. Built.
Source: Rest of World · 21 May 2026
The ceramicist Roberto Lugo — born in Kensington, Philadelphia, one of America's poorest neighbourhoods — has installed a monumental vase and fire hydrant sculpture in Madison Square Park. Titled *Alfarero del Barrio (Village Potter)*, the work celebrates Puerto Rican community life through the oldest of art forms: clay. Lugo, who began as a graffiti artist before studying ceramics, makes porcelain vessels decorated with portraits of hip-hop artists and civil rights leaders in the style of Sèvres and Meissen. The park installation is his largest public work — fine craft at civic scale, planted where Manhattan's art market and its street culture can both claim it. Source: Wallpaper · 21 May 2026
Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, the British design duo behind some of the most recognisable objects of the last three decades — the 2012 Olympic torch, Vitra's Tip Ton chair, furniture for Knoll and B&B Italia — have announced they are closing their London studio. The news, reported by Dezeen, marks the end of an era in British industrial design. No scandal, no bankruptcy — just a decision that the partnership has run its course. In a discipline that celebrates the new, knowing when to stop is its own kind of design. Source: Dezeen · 21 May 2026
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ's *Taiwan Travelogue*, translated by Lin King, has become the first Mandarin-language novel to win the International Booker Prize. The book weaves colonial-era Japanese tourism with contemporary Taiwanese identity, exploring how places are narrated into existence by their visitors. The win is a landmark for Taiwanese literature and for translators working in non-European languages — a reminder that the Anglophone publishing world's centre of gravity is shifting, slowly but measurably. Source: Condé Nast Traveler · 21 May 2026
At Imvelo Studios in Lusaka, the group exhibition *Rise and Shine* showcases emerging Zambian artists working across painting, sculpture and installation. The show's curatorial thesis is blunt: youth is "the current pulse of the nation." In a country where the median age is 17, that is less a provocation than a demographic fact. The work ranges from abstraction to pointed social commentary, and the gallery — itself a young institution — is betting that Lusaka can hold attention beyond the copper mines. Source: Artnet News · 21 May 2026
At the Newberry Volcano in central Oregon, researchers are drilling toward "superhot rock" — geothermal energy sources at temperatures exceeding 375°C, far hotter than conventional geothermal wells. Reasons to be Cheerful reports that this next-generation approach could produce five to ten times more energy per well than traditional geothermal, potentially turning volcanic regions worldwide into baseload power sources rivalling nuclear. The landscape above is all pine forests and lava flows; the energy below could be transformative. Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 21 May 2026
In a new essay for Aeon, economist Alan Manning argues that the fiercest political battle of our age — immigration — desperately needs less moral drama and more rigorous arithmetic. Manning's thesis: both pro- and anti-immigration camps have abandoned empirical trade-off analysis in favour of tribal signalling. The essay calls for "boring" policy design: transparent numbers, honest distributional analysis, explicit discussion of who gains and who loses. In an era of performative outrage on both sides, the suggestion that immigration policy should be dull is itself radical. Source: Aeon · 21 May 2026 ---
OpenAI's latest research system has produced a valid proof of a long-standing conjecture posed by the legendary Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. New Scientist reports that mathematicians have hailed it as AI's most significant breakthrough in pure mathematics to date — not a brute-force computation, but a result that required genuine structural insight. Previous AI achievements in maths, such as DeepMind's work on knot theory, were impressive but incremental. This is different in kind: a proof that human mathematicians had attempted for decades without success. The implications extend beyond mathematics. If AI systems can generate novel proofs of open conjectures, the relationship between human mathematicians and their tools changes fundamentally. The question is no longer whether AI can verify proofs (it can) or generate conjectures (it can), but whether it can do the creative middle step — finding the non-obvious path from hypothesis to conclusion. The Erdős result suggests the answer is yes, at least in some domains. Expect a fierce debate about authorship, credit and what "understanding" means when the prover has no understanding at all. Source: New Scientist · 21 May 2026
A new essay in Noema Magazine proposes that the most useful biological analogy for understanding AI is not the human brain but the dragonfly's. Dragonflies intercept prey in mid-flight with a success rate above 95 per cent, using a nervous system with fewer than a million neurons — compared to the human brain's 86 billion. Their trick is not more computation but better architecture: internal models of the target's trajectory that update in real time with minimal processing. The argument is that current AI systems are scaling in the wrong direction — more parameters, more data, more energy — when what matters is elegant, task-specific architecture. The dragonfly does not need to understand philosophy to catch a mosquito. Similarly, many real-world AI applications do not need trillion-parameter foundation models; they need small, fast, efficient systems that model their specific domain brilliantly. It is a provocation aimed at the "scale is all you need" consensus — and one with growing empirical support from the edge-computing and robotics communities. Source: Noema Magazine · 21 May 2026
President Trump shelved a planned AI executive order hours before a scheduled White House signing ceremony, citing concerns it could dull America's competitive edge. Politico reports that the reversal came after David Sacks, Trump's former AI czar, raised last-minute objections on behalf of tech companies who feared the order would impose compliance burdens. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had separately been pushing for faster AI policy action, creating an internal turf war. The result: America's AI governance remains in regulatory limbo. Europe has its AI Act. China has its own rules. The world's largest AI economy has, for now, nothing. Source: Politico Europe / Fast Company · 21 May 2026 ---
33
33%
That is the approximate share of new global solar capacity whose output is effectively cancelled each year by coal pollution, according to the research highlighted by Anthropocene Magazine. Not destroyed — the panels still exist — but degraded. Particulates from coal combustion scatter sunlight, reducing the irradiance that reaches photovoltaic cells. In the highest-pollution regions, the loss per panel can be even greater.
To put it concretely: the world installed roughly 600 gigawatts of new solar capacity in the past two years. If one-third of that output is suppressed by dirty air, we are losing the equivalent of approximately 200 gigawatts of effective solar generation — more than the entire installed solar capacity of the United States. We are building the clean energy future and simultaneously smothering it.
The number reframes the entire transition economics debate. Advocates for "all of the above" energy strategies — coal and solar running in parallel during the transition — now face an arithmetic problem. The two technologies are not merely competing for investment dollars. They are physically interfering with each other. Your coal plant's exhaust is your solar farm's shade.
For policymakers in Delhi, Beijing and Jakarta, the 33 per cent figure should land harder than any IPCC report. It is not about 2050 targets. It is about revenue lost today on infrastructure paid for yesterday.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 21 May 2026
In perspective
That is the approximate share of new global solar capacity whose output is effectively cancelled each year by coal pollution, according to the research highlighted by Anthropocene Magazine. Not destroyed — the panels still exist — but degraded. Particulates...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Coal and sun cannot coexist in the same airspace. That should be obvious, but it has taken a surprisingly long time to put numbers on it. Research now shows that coal pollution erases roughly a third of all new solar capacity worldwide, not by damaging the panels but by blocking the sunlight that is supposed to power them. Particulates and sulfur dioxide settle like a filter between the star and the cells, and every watt that was promised in the lab in Arizona shrinks when it has to deliver in Uttar Pradesh.
What makes this important is not the climate argument — we already know that one. It is the economic argument. Every new coal boiler worsens the business case for the solar farm downstream. This is not about ideology but about returns, about bankable numbers that no longer hold, about project financing built on solar irradiance that never arrives.
I have always believed that the energy transition will be decided by economics, not by activism. And that is precisely why this is a turning point. Anyone who invests in solar while simultaneously defending coal is sabotaging their own balance sheet. This is not a conflict between green and brown. It is a conflict between doing the math and not doing the math. And markets that stop doing the math always lose in the end.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai