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 · 31 May 2026
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed something counterintuitive: as coal-burning engines became more efficient, total coal consumption rose rather than fell. Cheaper energy per unit meant more units consumed. The finding was so inconvenient that policymakers spent a century and a half trying to wish it away. Now a fresh analysis from Anthropocene Magazine revisits the argument with modern data — and the implications for today's climate strategy are uncomfortable.
The core question is deceptively simple: does energy efficiency actually reduce carbon emissions? The intuitive answer — of course it does — underpins trillions of dollars in green-building subsidies, appliance standards, vehicle fuel-economy rules and industrial retrofits. But Jevons' insight, sometimes called the "rebound effect," suggests that efficiency gains lower the effective cost of energy services, which in turn stimulates more demand. You buy a fuel-efficient car and drive more. Your factory cuts energy costs per widget and produces more widgets. The economy grows, and aggregate energy use barely budges — or even climbs.
The modern evidence is mixed but not reassuring. Microeconomic studies consistently find "direct rebound" effects of 10–30 percent for household energy use: if your heating bill drops by a third, you turn the thermostat up a notch or heat an extra room. But the macroeconomic picture — the "indirect" and "economy-wide" rebound — is harder to measure and potentially much larger. When efficiency lowers costs across an entire economy, it can unlock growth in sectors that were previously energy-constrained. This is precisely what has happened with data centres: each generation of chips is vastly more efficient per computation, yet the AI boom has sent total data-centre energy demand soaring. Carbon Brief reported this week that the US is now investing more in fossil-fuel power capacity than China, driven almost entirely by the need to feed AI infrastructure.
None of this means efficiency is useless. It means efficiency alone is not a decarbonisation strategy. Without a hard cap on emissions — a carbon price, a quantity constraint, a regulatory ceiling — efficiency improvements risk becoming an accelerant rather than a brake. The policy implication is stark: governments that rely on efficiency mandates while avoiding carbon pricing are engaged in an elaborate exercise in self-deception.
This matters now because the political appetite for carbon pricing is near zero in most major economies. The US has never had a federal carbon price and shows no sign of adopting one. The EU's Emissions Trading System remains the global exception, not the rule. In the developing world, where energy demand growth is fastest, efficiency programmes funded by multilateral banks are often the only climate tool on offer.
Jevons has been dead for 144 years. His paradox is very much alive.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 31 May 2026
Now — The AI energy surge makes the paradox impossible to ignore: The collision is happening in real time. Every major cloud provider has pledged net-zero emissions by 2030 or 2040. Every one of them is simultaneously building gas-fired power plants to run AI workloads. The efficiency of individual chips improves by double digits annually; total energy consumption rises anyway. Policymakers who assumed efficiency would bend the curve are watching it steepen.
Soon — Britain's bond market draws the boundaries of political ambition: UK gilt yields are climbing again, and Bloomberg's analysis warns that the dynamic is structural, not cyclical. Britain's debt-to-GDP ratio is elevated, both major parties face pressure to spend more — on defence, on health, on infrastructure — and investors are quietly repricing the country's fiscal credibility. The echoes of the Liz Truss gilt crisis are deliberate: bond markets toppled a prime minister in 2022, and they are now signalling that the fiscal space available to any British government, regardless of party, is narrower than the political class acknowledges. For a country that once set the global benchmark for sovereign borrowing, the constraint is not just financial. It is constitutional. When the bond market dictates the limits of policy, elected leaders become administrators of someone else's risk appetite.
Later — The elephants vanish, and the dung beetles follow them into silence: A fifteen-year field experiment in Kenya, reported by Anthropocene Magazine, has produced one of the clearest demonstrations of coextinction ever recorded in the wild. When elephants were excluded from experimental plots, dung beetle populations collapsed — not gradually, but categorically. The beetles depend on elephant dung for food and breeding habitat; without it, they disappear, and with them the soil-aeration and nutrient-cycling services they provide. The finding reframes biodiversity loss as a cascade rather than a list. Conservation policy that focuses on individual charismatic species misses the architecture: remove one load-bearing beam and the ceiling falls on everything beneath it. The arithmetic of ecosystem collapse is not additive. It is multiplicative. Source: Anthropocene Magazine · 31 May 2026; Carbon Brief · 29 May 2026; Bloomberg · 31 May 2026 ---
Rescue workers have pulled stranded farmers from floodwaters after the Euphrates burst its banks in eastern Syria. The floods come on top of years of infrastructure neglect across a region still recovering from civil war and ISIS occupation. Irrigation systems, dams and levees have received minimal maintenance. The humanitarian response is complicated by overlapping jurisdictions — Turkish water management upstream, Kurdish-led administration locally, and the Assad-successor government in Damascus claiming sovereignty it cannot operationally enforce. Source: Al Jazeera · 31 May 2026
Philippine Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro used the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore to outline an expanding web of military partnerships with US allies — including Japan, Australia and South Korea — explicitly aimed at deterring Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. The positioning marks a decisive shift from Manila's decade of hedging. Teodoro's language was unusually direct: collective military deterrence, not diplomatic ambiguity, is the new operating principle. The move raises the stakes for Beijing, which has relied on bilateral pressure to keep Southeast Asian claimants isolated. Source: Bloomberg · 31 May 2026
South Africa's national parks authority SANParks has signed a historic agreement to give communities dispossessed during apartheid a stake in Kruger National Park — one of the world's most famous conservation areas. The deal allows communities to benefit economically from tourism and land use within the park's boundaries. It is a test case for the broader question of whether conservation and restitution can coexist, or whether one inevitably undermines the other. Similar claims cover nearly half of South Africa's protected areas. Source: Mail & Guardian · 31 May 2026
Ethiopia's total public debt has reached $51.8 billion, straining the IMF's flagship debt-restructuring programme. Washington is preparing renewed annual support and the World Bank is expanding financing, but economists warn that rising debt-servicing costs, sovereign risk transfer and persistent hard-currency shortages could derail the experiment. Ethiopia is meant to prove that the G20 Common Framework for debt treatment actually works. If it stumbles, dozens of other heavily indebted low-income countries will draw grim conclusions about whether multilateral rescue is worth the political cost of reform. Source: The Africa Report · 31 May 2026
Edmundo González Urrutia, recognised by the United States as the actual winner of Venezuela's 2024 presidential election, has announced his support for a new vote. The decision represents a pragmatic recalculation: international pressure alone has not dislodged Maduro, and the opposition calculates that a fresh, internationally supervised election is a more viable path than indefinite exile-government limbo. The risk is legitimising Maduro's timeline and conditions. Source: Straits Times · 31 May 2026
India has concluded a deal to sell BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles to Vietnam, reportedly valued at around ₹6,000 crore (approximately $700 million), including training and logistical support. It is India's second BrahMos export after the Philippines. The sale deepens the military relationship between two countries that share a strategic interest in counterbalancing Chinese maritime power. For India's defence industry, it is a proof-of-concept that indigenously developed weapons systems can compete in export markets traditionally dominated by Russia, the US and France. Source: Hindu BusinessLine · 31 May 2026
Thousands of police officers were deployed across France after Paris Saint-Germain's Champions League victory over Arsenal triggered wild celebrations that spilled into riots. Crowds fired flares, overturned cars and clashed with riot police in multiple cities. Hundreds were arrested. The scenes reprise a familiar French pattern: sporting euphoria as the spark for urban unrest that has little to do with football and everything to do with the pressures — economic marginalisation, policing grievances, housing costs — that simmer beneath the surface of French civic life. The government faces the awkward task of celebrating a national sporting triumph while prosecuting the people who celebrated it. Source: BBC World · 31 May 2026
CAS Star, a venture capital firm born out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is reaping returns from a decade-long bet on photonic computing — using light instead of electrons to process data. As AI workloads push the physical limits of conventional chips, photonic processors offer radical improvements in speed and energy efficiency. The firm's founder Mi Lei has spent more than ten years funding research that the mainstream semiconductor industry ignored. Now, with global demand for AI infrastructure exploding, what looked like a niche academic interest has become a commercially viable frontier. Source: South China Morning Post · 31 May 2026 ---
There is a particular pleasure in watching small operators rush into the space that big, complacent incumbents abandoned. It is happening right now on the African continent, and the pattern is unmistakable.
France's corporate giants — Total, Bolloré, Orange — have been retreating from West and Central Africa for years, pressured by political hostility, security costs and the sheer fatigue of operating in places where governments change by coup and contracts change with them. The conventional reading is that France is losing Africa. The more interesting reading is that a different kind of French enterprise is finding it.
Bpifrance, France's public investment bank, reports a surge of specialised SMEs forging partnerships across the continent. These are not colonial holdovers or resource extractors. They are logistics consultants working port infrastructure in Mombasa, agri-tech firms partnering with cooperatives in Côte d'Ivoire, energy service companies wiring solar micro-grids in Senegal. They are small, fast, and allergic to the mahogany-panelled boardrooms of the Françafrique era.
What makes this interesting is not the French angle — it is the structural insight. Large incumbents retreat when environments become difficult. They have shareholders to calm and quarterly reports to file. But difficult environments are precisely where the margins are widest for those willing to tolerate chaos. The SMEs stepping in are not braver than the corporates. They are lighter. They can tolerate disorder because they have less to lose and more to learn.
Arnaud Floris, Bpifrance's Africa director, calls it "high-impact commerce" — an ugly phrase for a beautiful dynamic. The old model was: send a giant, extract value, repatriate profits. The new model is: send a specialist, build a partnership, share the upside. It is not charity. It is capitalism that works precisely because it is small enough to adapt.
The pattern recurs everywhere structural power vacuums appear. When the big operators leave, the interesting operators arrive. The trick is recognising that the retreat of the giant is not the end of the story. It is the beginning.
Source: The Africa Report · 31 May 2026
The Genevan artist John M Armleder has been given carte blanche at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in his home city — and has used it to stage a conversation between the museum's permanent collection and his own irreverent interventions. Armleder, now in his eighties, has spent decades blurring the line between decoration and fine art. The show juxtaposes Old Master paintings with Armleder's Pour Paintings and furniture sculptures, forcing visitors to question whether aesthetic hierarchies are meaningful or merely inherited. It is the kind of institutional self-interrogation that most museums are too timid to attempt. Source: Artnet News · 31 May 2026
FGMF Arquitetos has completed the Valente, a 21-storey mixed-use building in São Paulo composed of stacked, protruding rectangular volumes that give the façade a pixelated, almost geological quality. Developed by Idea!Zarvos — a firm known for commissioning architecturally ambitious projects — the building rejects the smooth curtain-wall orthodoxy that dominates high-rise construction worldwide. Each protruding volume contains a multi-level office or residential unit with its own identity. It is an argument, in concrete and glass, that density need not mean monotony. Source: Dezeen · 30 May 2026
More than 4,500 German schools now carry the designation "School Without Racism — School With Courage," a programme that requires students and staff to commit actively to confronting discrimination. Reasons to be Cheerful reports from a high school in Renningen, where tenth- and eleventh-graders spend hours in workshops on racism, bystander intervention and sexualised violence. The programme is not a curriculum add-on; it is a binding social contract that each school community votes to adopt. What makes the initiative remarkable is its longevity and scale — it has operated for decades and now covers roughly a quarter of German secondary schools. In a European landscape where far-right parties are gaining ground by exploiting identity anxieties, the programme represents a grassroots counter-investment: not in policy, but in the habits of democratic coexistence. Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 31 May 2026
On the 80th anniversary of its publication, Saint-Exupéry's fable remains France's bestselling book and one of the most translated works in history — over 500 languages and dialects. Monocle's retrospective argues that the book's power lies precisely in its simplicity: it says things that more sophisticated literature circles around without ever landing. "On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur" is a line that every adult recognises as sentimental and every adult needs to hear again. The anniversary arrives at a moment when children's literature is under unprecedented political pressure in multiple countries, making the Prince's gentle insistence on imagination feel less quaint than urgent. Source: Monocle · 31 May 2026
Casa Eco, designed by Sensacional Dinámica Mexicana in Baja California, is constructed around the rocky outcrops it sits on rather than blasting them away. Cactus walls serve as natural screens, and the building's thermal mass is borrowed from the desert floor. The architects describe it as "symbiosis" — a word usually debased by marketing, but here earned by practice. The house does not impose itself on the landscape. It negotiates with it. Source: Wallpaper · 31 May 2026
Studio Weave has built a public toilet pavilion in North Paddington using stone salvaged from a demolished office building. Commissioned by Westminster City Council, it replaces an underground facility that had become inaccessible and attracted antisocial behaviour. The architects describe the project as an exercise in "expressing democracy" — the idea that public infrastructure, even at its most functional, deserves dignity. It is a small building with a large argument: that the quality of a society is visible in how it treats its most mundane needs. Source: Dezeen · 30 May 2026 ---
The honeymoon is over. Multiple reports this week — from the South China Morning Post, the Straits Times and the Japan Times — converge on the same story: enterprise customers who rushed to adopt AI tools are now staring at invoices they did not budget for. The culprit is partly the end of "subsidised intelligence," the Silicon Valley practice of pricing AI services below cost to build market share, then raising prices once customers are locked in. But it is also the cost of AI agents — autonomous software that performs tasks without human oversight — which consume far more compute than simple chatbot queries. The strategic implication is significant. Companies that embedded AI deeply into workflows now face switching costs that make renegotiation difficult. Those that took a more cautious approach — piloting AI in contained environments before scaling — are in a stronger position. The lesson is an old one dressed in new silicon: the cheapest product in the market is usually the most expensive in the long run. Source: South China Morning Post · 31 May 2026; Straits Times · 31 May 2026
Scientists have created embryo organoids — structures grown from stem cells that mimic the earliest stages of human development — without using sperm or eggs. The research, reported by New Scientist, enables researchers to study implantation, the process by which an embryo attaches to the uterine wall, in unprecedented detail. Implantation failure is the single largest cause of early pregnancy loss, yet it has been almost impossible to study because it happens inside the body, out of sight and out of reach. The organoids allow scientists to recreate the biochemical dialogue between embryo and uterus in a lab dish, opening paths to treatments for infertility, recurrent miscarriage and pre-eclampsia. The ethical framework is clearer than for traditional embryo research: because no fertilisation occurs, the organoids do not raise the same questions about the moral status of embryos. It is a case where a technical workaround — growing something that behaves like an embryo but isn't one — has neatly sidestepped a regulatory and ethical impasse that stalled research for decades. Source: New Scientist · 31 May 2026
A new experiment reported by New Scientist has confirmed one of quantum mechanics' stranger predictions: if you try to "snip" the end off a photon — a particle of light — it does not shorten. It multiplies. The finding reinforces the indivisibility of quantum particles while revealing new behaviour at the boundary between classical and quantum optics. The practical relevance is not immediate, but the finding is directly applicable to quantum communication and cryptography, where the integrity of individual photons is the foundation of security. Any attempt to intercept or divide a photon in transit would produce detectable copies rather than a clean theft — a natural alarm system built into the physics itself. Source: New Scientist · 31 May 2026 ---
5
5 gigawatts
That is the additional data-centre capacity SoftBank has pledged to build in France, at a cost of up to €75 billion. To put 5 gigawatts in perspective: it is roughly equivalent to the output of five large nuclear reactors, or enough to power a city of 3–4 million people. France is betting that its relatively clean electricity grid — dominated by nuclear power — makes it the ideal European host for AI infrastructure that would be carbon-intensive almost anywhere else.
The number ties directly to today's signal. Each of those data centres will be filled with the most energy-efficient chips money can buy. And each will consume more power than the one before it, because efficiency enables scale, and scale enables demand, and demand enables more scale. Jevons would recognise the pattern instantly. The question is whether French policymakers do.
Source: Financial Times · 31 May 2026; TechCrunch · 31 May 2026
In perspective
That is the additional data-centre capacity SoftBank has pledged to build in France, at a cost of up to €75 billion. To put 5 gigawatts in perspective: it is roughly equivalent to the output of five large nuclear reactors, or enough to power a city of 3–4...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Efficiency has never saved us from ourselves. It's one of the most uncomfortable truths in economic history, and it was articulated as early as 1865 by William Stanley Jevons: when we get better at using energy, we use more of it. Not less. Each generation of more efficient chips drives total energy consumption for AI infrastructure up, not down. SoftBank is building five gigawatts of new data center capacity in France, equivalent to five nuclear reactors, filled with the most energy-efficient processors money can buy. And they will consume more power than anything that came before them.
This is not an argument against efficiency. That would be like arguing against getting smarter. But it is an argument against treating efficiency as a climate strategy. The political convenience of subsidizing better light bulbs and more fuel-efficient cars without putting a price on carbon is exactly that: convenient. It sidesteps the only mechanism that actually limits emissions, which is making it more expensive to emit.
I've built companies my entire life and I know that cost savings never lead to doing less. They lead to doing more. That's the entire point of entrepreneurship. But when it comes to the planet's carbon budget, we need a constraint that the market doesn't create on its own. Carbon pricing is not popular. It's just necessary.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai