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 · 4 May 2026
In a laboratory in Brazil, fire ants exposed to biochar — the carbon-rich soil amendment made by pyrolysing organic waste — began foraging twice as fast, building nests three times more complex, and forming tighter social bonds. Then the researchers increased the concentration. The ants stopped moving. Some died.
The study, published this week by a team at Anthropocene Magazine, is a small experiment about insects. But it is also a parable about one of the most hyped climate solutions on Earth, and the vanishingly thin line between regeneration and toxicity.
Biochar has become the darling of the carbon-removal world. Its logic is seductive: take agricultural waste, heat it without oxygen, and produce a stable, porous carbon material that locks CO₂ in soil for centuries while improving fertility. Governments from the EU to Kenya are subsidising it. Startups are selling carbon credits based on it. The voluntary carbon market now trades biochar credits at a premium, because permanence is the magic word buyers want to hear.
But the ant study surfaces an uncomfortable question that the biochar industry has mostly avoided: what happens to the living systems in the soil when you add this stuff at scale? The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on dosage — and nobody has agreed on what the right dosage is.
At low concentrations, the biochar acted almost like a stimulant for the ant colonies. Foraging efficiency doubled. Nest architecture became dramatically more elaborate, suggesting enhanced communication and coordination. The researchers hypothesise that biochar's porous microstructure may improve chemical signalling in soil environments, essentially amplifying the pheromone trails ants use to organise.
At high concentrations, the effect reversed. The material's alkalinity and its capacity to adsorb organic molecules — the same properties that make it useful for water filtration — appeared to disrupt the ants' chemical ecology. The colonies collapsed.
This is not the first warning sign. Scattered studies over the past three years have shown that biochar application rates vary wildly across commercial projects, from 5 tonnes per hectare to over 100. The carbon credit market incentivises volume: more biochar in the ground means more credits sold. But the biological tolerance of soil ecosystems does not scale linearly with the financial incentive to bury carbon.
The broader issue is that biochar is being deployed as if it were inert — a simple storage medium, like a filing cabinet for CO₂. The ant research suggests it is anything but inert. It is biologically active, chemically reactive, and dose-dependent in ways that commercial projects are not yet designed to measure.
None of this means biochar is a bad idea. It may be a very good idea. But it is being scaled by a market that rewards speed and volume, governed by certification standards that focus on carbon permanence rather than ecological impact, and sold to buyers who rarely ask what it does to the worms, the fungi, the microbes — or the ants.
Jan Stenbeck would have recognised the pattern instantly. He spent his life watching industries mistake speed for wisdom. The biochar market is not wrong. It is just moving faster than its understanding.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · May 2026
Short term (now–12 months): The biochar carbon credit market is entering a critical credibility phase. Several major registries — including Puro.earth and the European Biochar Certificate — are updating their standards in 2026. The ant study and similar ecological research will feed directly into debates about whether application-rate caps should be included in credit certification. If they are, the supply of eligible biochar credits contracts, prices rise, and some startups built on volume-based models face margin pressure.
Medium term (1–3 years): Soil ecology is becoming the next frontier of climate-tech due diligence. Just as investors learned to ask about methane leakage rates for natural gas projects, they will increasingly need to understand biological impact thresholds for soil-based carbon removal. This creates a new niche for ecological monitoring — sensor grids, eDNA sampling, biodiversity audits — bolted onto carbon removal projects. The companies that build these measurement tools will become gatekeepers.
Long term (3–10 years): The deeper lesson is about the maturation cycle of climate solutions. Solar and wind went through a similar arc: early enthusiasm, overdeployment in unsuitable contexts, backlash, and then course correction into robust, well-governed industries. Biochar is at the early-enthusiasm stage. The question is whether the correction happens gracefully — through better science and smarter standards — or messily, through an ecological incident that discredits the entire sector. The ants are the early warning system. The question is whether anyone is listening. Source: Anthropocene Magazine · May 2026 ---
A Politico Europe investigation has revealed the scale of sabotage targeting German energy and transport networks by far-left extremists. The attacks — on power lines, rail signalling equipment and cable ducts — have intensified in frequency and sophistication, moving beyond symbolic vandalism into operations that cause genuine disruption. German security services are struggling to attribute and prevent the attacks, which exploit the decentralised, difficult-to-guard nature of critical infrastructure. The irony is acute: groups motivated by climate ideology are attacking the very grid that Germany needs to electrify. Source: Politico Europe · May 2026
Malaysia's anti-corruption agency has questioned former economy minister Rafizi Ramli over a billion-ringgit semiconductor deal with British chip designer Arm Holdings. Rafizi, once one of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's closest allies, arrived at the MACC on Monday for questioning in an inquiry that has already ensnared ministers and senior officials. The probe puts pressure on Anwar's reform credentials and exposes the political fault lines around Southeast Asia's race to become a chip-making hub. Source: South China Morning Post · May 2026
A global day of mobilisation called by opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace laureate María Corina Machado brought protests to more than 120 cities worldwide on Sunday. Inside Venezuela, demonstrations took place despite the risk of arrest. According to the latest report from Foro Penal, 454 people remained detained for political reasons as of late April. The Maduro regime continues to tighten its grip, but the diaspora's capacity for coordinated global pressure shows no sign of fading. Source: Mercopress · May 2026
In Ozuzu, a rural community in southeastern Nigeria, a solar installation by Renewvia Energy has ignited a small economic boom. Businesses that previously shut at sundown now operate into the evening. Cold-chain storage is allowing farmers to sell produce at better prices. The project is one of a growing number of distributed solar deployments in Nigeria's oil-producing regions — communities that sit atop billions of barrels of crude but have never been connected to the national grid. Source: Business Day Nigeria · May 2026
Southeast Asian nations are diversifying oil imports away from traditional Middle Eastern suppliers, shifting toward Brunei, Libya and the United States, according to Nikkei Asia. The realignment is driven by supply disruptions linked to the Iran conflict and strategic hedging against further Strait of Hormuz closures. The shift is small in absolute volumes but significant as a signal: ASEAN energy planners are treating Gulf instability as structural rather than temporary. Source: Nikkei Asia · May 2026
An investigation by the Mail and Guardian reveals that delayed coal plant closures are keeping South Africa's ageing power stations online well past their intended retirement dates. The Just Energy Transition Partnership — the $8.5 billion deal struck with Western donors — was supposed to accelerate decarbonisation. Instead, Eskom's grid instability and political resistance from coal-dependent regions have stalled closures. The question of who actually shapes the energy transition — donors, utilities, or local politicians — remains unanswered. Source: Mail and Guardian · May 2026
French banking giants including Société Générale are retreating from retail branch networks across francophone Africa and pivoting toward sovereign debt management and strategic financial corridors. The shift, reported by The Africa Report, reflects both the political toxicity of visible French commercial presence in the Sahel and a hard-nosed calculation: margins on government bond issuance and infrastructure finance dwarf those on consumer banking in markets with low per-capita income. Source: The Africa Report · May 2026
Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi visited the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in international waters off Uruguay's coast on Saturday, following similar visits by Argentina's Milei and Chile's Kast. The opposition immediately alleged the visit was unconstitutional, citing restrictions on foreign military operations near Uruguayan territory. The episode illustrates how the Southern Seas 2026 deployment is becoming a political litmus test across South America — a handshake with Washington that carries domestic consequences. Source: Mercopress · May 2026 ---
Blessing Ebere in Ozuzu, Nigeria, remembers the exact moment the solar panels went live. She could keep her shop open after dark. Her neighbours could refrigerate fish. Children could study past sunset.
Jan Stenbeck would have recognised Ozuzu instantly — not as a charity case but as a market. He spent his career finding customers that monopolies had decided were not worth serving. Millicom was built on the insight that people in emerging markets wanted mobile phones just as badly as Scandinavians did; the incumbents simply hadn't bothered to find out.
Renewvia Energy, the company behind the Ozuzu installation, operates on a similar logic. Nigeria produces over two million barrels of oil per day. Yet roughly 85 million Nigerians — nearly half the population — lack reliable electricity access. The national grid reaches cities and industrial zones. Rural communities in the oil-producing south are often invisible to it.
What Renewvia and a handful of similar companies are doing is bypassing the grid entirely. Distributed solar with battery storage turns each community into its own micro-utility. The economics work because the alternative is not cheap grid power but expensive, polluting diesel generators — or no power at all.
Jan never romanticised poverty. He romanticised the business opportunity inside unmet demand. Ozuzu has demand. It now has supply. The fact that the supply is solar rather than an extension of Nigeria's oil-powered grid is not irony — it is the market working faster than the state.
Source: Business Day Nigeria · May 2026
Up to 40,000 people descended on a military firing range near Bourges, France, for an illegal "free party" — one of the largest unsanctioned raves in European history. Authorities were caught off guard by the speed of mobilisation, organised through encrypted channels. The French free party movement, which traces its roots to the early 1990s tekno scene, has seen a resurgence in the post-pandemic years. The military site was chosen precisely because its isolation made early police intervention difficult. Source: Al Jazeera · May 2026
At David Nolan Gallery in New York, sculptor Mel Kendrick opens "Tilt," his ninth solo show with the gallery. Kendrick has spent decades carving, splitting and reassembling wood into forms that feel simultaneously ancient and algorithmic. The new work introduces saturated colour for the first time — vivid blues and reds soaking into the cut surfaces. The effect is startling: familiar objects made strange, a career signature renewed without being abandoned. Source: Artnet News · May 2026
A new bar in Los Angeles' Silver Lake neighbourhood channels Milanese opera culture with velvet banquettes, references to La Scala, and Negronis described by Wallpaper as "the size of your face." Bar di Bello is part of a broader wave of Italian-inflected hospitality in Los Angeles that goes beyond red-sauce nostalgia into a more atmospheric, design-conscious register. The owners are Italian-born but LA-raised. Source: Wallpaper · May 2026
The mega-gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan is testing an auction-style sales format, led by a $15 million de Kooning. The experiment blurs the boundary between primary gallery sales — traditionally opaque and relationship-driven — and the public transparency of the auction house. Meanwhile, artist Zoe Leonard has departed Hauser & Wirth, and two smaller galleries have shuttered, underscoring the ongoing consolidation of the art market's upper tier. Source: Artnet News · May 2026
Bernard Tschumi Architects has completed Philo, a ring-shaped science centre at the Institute Le Rosey boarding school near Geneva. The building is organised around a skylit atrium traversed by staircases and — unusually — helical slides connecting five storeys of classrooms and laboratories. Tschumi's argument: the slide is not a gimmick but a circulation strategy that makes vertical movement joyful, encouraging spontaneous encounters between students in different disciplines. Source: Dezeen · May 2026
Aureliano Mendes, 69, left the Spanish port of Gandia on a sailboat and was given up for dead. His engine failed, his radio died, his GPS went dark. For twelve days he drifted through five-metre waves with almost no food or water before a merchant vessel spotted him off the Algerian coast. El País published his first interview — a story of stubbornness, seamanship, and the kind of survival narrative that belongs in another century. Source: El País · May 2026 ---
Vietnam's tech sector is racing to hire AI engineers, but according to Nikkei Asia, the competition is not primarily about salaries. Companies report that the decisive factors are project quality, intellectual challenge, and the opportunity to work on proprietary models rather than fine-tuning Western ones. Vietnamese AI researchers who trained at top international labs are returning — but only for roles that offer genuine research autonomy. The dynamic mirrors patterns seen earlier in China and India, where a critical mass of returnee talent catalyses a domestic AI ecosystem. Vietnam's advantage: lower costs than China, fewer geopolitical complications than Russia, and a government actively courting semiconductor investment. Source: Nikkei Asia · May 2026
A Harvard study published this week tested large language models against human emergency room physicians on real clinical cases. At least one model outperformed two human doctors in diagnostic accuracy. The study is significant not because it suggests replacing emergency physicians — the researchers explicitly caution against that — but because it identifies the specific conditions under which AI excels: cases involving rare presentations, atypical symptom combinations, and conditions where pattern recognition across vast datasets outperforms individual clinical experience. The implication for healthcare systems is a triage co-pilot, not a replacement — but one that catches the cases humans are statistically most likely to miss. Source: TechCrunch · May 2026
Der Spiegel reports that German authorities have obtained detailed membership records kept by Islamic State — a bureaucracy of evil that meticulously documented its recruits. The records reveal that some suspected terrorists are apparently still living in Germany. The story is not strictly about AI, but it intersects with the technology debate: cross-referencing such lists against immigration databases, financial records and communications metadata is precisely the kind of task that AI-driven intelligence analysis is built for — and precisely the kind that raises the sharpest civil liberties questions. Source: Der Spiegel · May 2026 ---
2
2x
That is how much faster fire ants forage when exposed to biochar at low concentrations — and how starkly the effect reverses at high doses. The number, from the Anthropocene Magazine study, encapsulates the central dilemma of the biochar carbon credit market: the same properties that make it biologically beneficial at one dosage make it toxic at another. The voluntary carbon market currently has no standard mechanism for regulating application rates. Credits are sold based on tonnes of carbon buried, not on what that carbon does to the soil it enters. Two-times-faster is the upside. Colony collapse is the downside. The distance between them is a dosage curve that the market has not yet learned to price.
Source: Anthropocene Magazine · May 2026
In perspective
That is how much faster fire ants forage when exposed to biochar at low concentrations — and how starkly the effect reverses at high doses. The number, from the Anthropocene Magazine study, encapsulates the central dilemma of the biochar carbon credit market:...
8 — Today's Wisdom
There's a Brazilian study on fire ants and biochar that tells you more about the climate industry than most quarterly reports. At low doses, the ants doubled their efficiency, built more complex nests, collaborated better. At high doses, the colonies collapsed. Same substance, same properties, completely different outcomes. The difference was dosage.
Biochar is one of the hottest solutions in the carbon credit market right now. The logic is elegant: take organic waste, heat it without oxygen, bury the carbon in the soil where it stays for hundreds of years. Governments subsidize it, startups sell credits on it, and the market rewards whoever buries the most. More carbon in the ground means more credits sold. But nobody has determined what the right dose actually is, and the market's incentives point in entirely the wrong direction.
I've seen this pattern before. Not with biochar, but with technology, with business models, with entire industries. Something works brilliantly at small scale, and then everyone assumes it works just as well multiplied by a thousand. It almost never does. Scaling without understanding isn't ambition, it's carelessness.
Biochar might be a genuinely good idea. But a good idea that scales faster than the knowledge behind it isn't innovation. It's speculation with ecosystems as the stake. And ants are better at warning us than we are at listening.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai