Jean-Christophe Duval

1. The Illusion of Catching Up

For several years now, European leaders have been repeating the same promise:

• invest more;

• produce more;

• innovate more;

• build more factories;

• develop more AI.

The diagnosis is simple:

“We have fallen behind China. We must accelerate.”

This diagnosis even has its founding text. In September 2024, Mario Draghi delivered his report on the future of European competitiveness to the European Commission. His prescription: 800 billion euros in additional investment per year, nearly 5% of the Union’s GDP, to “close the gap”. Failing which, he warned, Europe would face a “slow agony”.

One year later, barely more than 10% of his recommendations had begun to be implemented.

But this strategy assumes one thing:

that China will wait for us.

And it will not.

While Europe debates, China invests.

While Europe regulates, China builds.

While Europe hesitates, China is already planning the next decade.

This is not a figure of speech: in March 2026, Beijing launched its fifteenth five-year plan. Its stated objective — to become the world’s leading technological superpower.

But the real question may not be how to catch up with China. It is whether this race is still worth winning.

This is no longer merely a question of competitiveness. It is a question of purpose.

Let us be fair: Draghi is probably right… within the current paradigm.

And that is precisely the problem.

In other words: the Draghi report may be the best possible diagnosis… of a paradigm that is coming to an end.

2. Why China Is Probably Beyond Catching

It is not a question of intelligence. It is not a question of more efficient workers.

It is a question of structure.

China has:

• a long-term industrial vision;

• a monetary policy serving its strategy;

• planning spanning several decades;

• an immense domestic market;

• considerable public investment capacity;

• a productive apparatus that has now moved up the value chain.

The figures give the measure of the gap. China now accounts for roughly 30% of global manufacturing output — its sixteenth consecutive year in first place. The United States accounts for 17%, Germany for 5%.

And in so-called “clean” technologies — solar panels, batteries, wind turbines, heat pumps, electrolysers — the dominance is even more crushing: China concentrates between 60% and 85% of global production capacity. The International Energy Agency now compares this grip to OPEC’s hold on oil. Without China, the rest of the world can meet only a quarter of global demand.

Six years of American tariffs, sanctions and export controls have not slowed this trajectory.

China is no longer merely seeking to produce more cheaply. It now seeks to become the world’s leading technological power.

In other words:

it is already playing the next game.

The real trap, then, is not being outpaced by China. It is believing that victory still consists in resembling it.

3. The Real Problem: We Are Still Playing the 20th-Century Game

The entire global competition remains organised around the same obsession:

• produce more;

• export more;

• grow faster;

• win market share.

But this logic belongs to the century of energy abundance.

We are now entering a world of limits:

• climate limits;

• mineral limits;

• energy limits;

• water limits;

• biological limits.

And this race has a cost that no one enters on the balance sheets.

Every point of GDP won in this competition is a withdrawal from stocks that do not replenish themselves: minerals, energy, soils, water, living systems. The two competitors face off by spending a capital that belongs to neither of them.

The irony is complete: even the “green transition”, conducted as a race, is an acceleration of extraction. European demand for lithium could be up to 21 times higher by 2050. The OECD projects a 150% increase in global metal use by 2060. And Europe depends 100% on China for its refined heavy rare earths: the faster it accelerates on China’s terrain, the deeper it sinks into the very dependence it claims to be fighting.

The winner itself gets burned by this game. Chinese overinvestment — 42% of GDP, against an OECD average of 23% — generates serial overproduction crises: solar panels, steel, aluminium, automobiles. Mountains of matter and energy dissipated for products sold at a loss or destroyed. Chinese solar industrialists themselves speak of a “death cycle”, with prices barely covering production costs.

We speak endlessly of competitiveness. But competitiveness with respect to what? To a planet that does not negotiate? To resources that do not vote? To physical limits that ignore GDP rankings?

We continue to reason as if wealth consisted solely in producing more, when the real limiting factor is becoming the capacity of ecosystems to absorb that production.

China is not winning this race. It is winning it on the books. The real cost is transferred to the only actor that sits at no negotiating table.

Neither Brussels nor Beijing pays the price of the game.

The planet is the payer of first resort.

And this externalisation is not a moral accident. It is inscribed in the monetary architecture itself. Credit money demands repayment in monetary flows, never in biospheric flows. Financial debt is enforceable; ecological debt is not. The measurement system that referees the competition — GDP, market share, trade balance — counts only extraction as wealth, and never regeneration.

Europe is not losing because it plays badly. It is losing because it is trying to win a competition whose victory accelerates precisely what threatens its future prosperity.

The question is therefore no longer:

Who will produce the most?

The question becomes:

Who will be able to sustain the best level of prosperity over time with the fewest resources?

4. The Zero-Sum Game Everyone Wants to Win

We must pause for a moment on the measuring instrument of this competition: the trade balance.

For it rests on an arithmetical absurdity that no one questions.

The sum of the world’s trade balances is zero, by construction. Every surplus is someone else’s deficit. A world in which every country aims for a surplus is a world pursuing an accounting impossibility.

It is the queue contest: everyone stands on tiptoe. No one sees better. Everyone’s calves hurt.

And even when “won”, the game never ends. A surplus is not an achievement: it is a position to be defended permanently — through wage compression, currency undervaluation, subsidised overproduction. China is the textbook case: household consumption limited to 40% of GDP, forced savings compensating for inadequate pensions, an export apparatus fed at the expense of living standards. Germany tells the same story in its European version.

Competition through the trade balance is a machine for transferring household income to the export apparatus — in the “winner” as much as in the loser.

And its lasting equilibrium is an illusion. The surplus country accumulates financial claims on the deficit countries. These claims can only be honoured if the deficit countries export in turn — that is, if the surplus country gives up its surplus. The system only “repays itself” by endlessly accelerating physical flows: more freight, more extraction, more dissipation.

Most remarkably, orthodoxy itself knew this.

At Bretton Woods, in 1944, John Maynard Keynes proposed an international clearing house — the International Clearing Union and its currency, the bancor — which penalised excessive surpluses and deficits symmetrically. Keynes had understood that the race for surpluses was destabilising by construction. His proposal was rejected by the United States, then in surplus.

In other words: the current rules of the game were not chosen because they were rational. They were imposed by the winner of the moment.

This is precisely the project that the NES (NEMO Exchange Standard) takes up: an architecture for balancing international trade that penalises imbalances symmetrically — as Keynes intended — and integrates what 1944 did not know: the biospheric cost of flows. The bancor corrected accounting imbalances. The NES corrects accounting and ecological imbalances.

For the real paradigm shift does not consist in playing the same game better. It consists in changing the objective function itself. For two centuries, economies have optimised for growth. The 21st century will demand that we optimise for robustness.

This idea is not new in the history of science. As Thomas Kuhn showed, paradigms do not disappear because they become slightly less effective. They are replaced when the anomalies they produce become too numerous to ignore.

Economics seems to be approaching that moment. The climate, energy, geopolitical and social crises may not be successive accidents. They could be the symptoms of a paradigm that has become incapable of integrating the physical limits of the biosphere.

Changing paradigms is therefore not an ideological choice. It may simply be the next step in the evolution of economic thought.

5. True Innovation Means Changing Paradigms

Throughout history, great powers have not always won by playing better.

They have often won by completely changing the rules.

Europe possesses precisely a unique advantage.

It is the first region in the world to face simultaneously:

• demographic ageing;

• the climate constraint;

• energy scarcity;

• a strong democratic demand.

In other words:

it is the natural laboratory of a new economic model.

Let us be clear, for the objection will come: changing paradigms does not mean giving up industry. It means an industry oriented differently — material sobriety, repairability, circularity, relocalisation of vital functions. It is not producing less out of defeat; it is producing what is right, out of lucidity.

Instead of trying to beat China on the terrain of industrial growth, Europe could become the world’s leading power in robustness.

Robustness is not the capacity to grow faster than others. It is the capacity to keep prospering when conditions turn unfavourable.

6. The True Competitive Advantage of the 21st Century

In a world subject to planetary limits, wealth will no longer be merely the capacity to produce.

It will be the capacity to endure.

The most prosperous nations will be those able to:

• preserve their ecosystems;

• reduce their dependence on scarce resources;

• maintain strong social cohesion;

• orient money towards regeneration rather than extraction.

In other words, tomorrow’s real competition will no longer be a competition of power.

It will be a competition of robustness.

And this is precisely the paradigm shift that NEMO IMS proposes, on two complementary levels:

Internally: making money no longer an accelerator of material growth, but an instrument of ecological, social and economic resilience — a currency whose creation rewards regeneration rather than extraction.

Externally: the NES, an international exchange standard that replaces the absurd race for surpluses with a balancing of flows that integrates their biospheric cost.

Changing the rules of the game means, first of all, changing what money counts.

Conclusion

The 20th century rewarded economies capable of producing ever more.

The 21st century will reward those able to prosper sustainably in a finite world.

If China has become impossible to catch within the old paradigm, the answer may not be to run faster. Running faster means extracting faster, dissipating faster, and presenting the bill to the only payer who cannot refuse.

The answer may be far more ambitious: inventing the next economic paradigm.

For two centuries, power has been measured by the capacity to extract more than others.

The 21st century will measure power by the capacity to preserve what everyone’s prosperity depends on.

Civilisations do not become dominant because they win every competition. They become dominant when they invent the rules of the next one.

Jean-Christophe Duval

There exists a strange category of wealth that our economy is incapable of financing. Not because it would be useless. Quite the opposite — it is indispensable! But our way of conceiving the economy does not know how to integrate it. This is what I call the insolvable essential.

Part One — What, exactly, is solvency?

We use the word “solvable” as if it were self-evident. It is not. It designates a very precise mechanism, and it is in that precision that the lock resides.

An activity is solvable, in the sense our monetary architecture intends, when it meets a single but demanding condition: it must be able to generate, in the future, a monetary flow sufficient to repay a lent capital, increased by its interest, within a timeframe compatible with that loan, and to the benefit of whoever repays.

This sentence sounds technical. It is, in reality, the heart of the problem.

For it contains, concealed within it, four distinct conditions. Four locks that an activity must open simultaneously in order to have the right to exist monetarily. Let us examine them one by one.

First lock: monetizability

To repay a credit, you need a monetary flow. Not value in general: money — measurable, collectible, dated.

This presupposes that the value produced by the activity translates somewhere into a price. A good sold, a service invoiced, a receipt.

Yet an immense part of what is indispensable to us produces no price.

What is the price of a stable climate? What is the turnover of a species that does not go extinct? How much does an aquifer that stays drinkable take in?

These values are real. They are even decisive. But they pass through no transaction. They generate no flow. They exist outside the monetary circuit.

The first lock therefore eliminates, from the outset, everything that produces value without producing a price.

Dramatically, in the way we do economics, whatever does not count for money does not count at all.

Second lock: appropriability

Suppose an activity does produce a measurable benefit. It must still be possible for that benefit to be captured by whoever finances it, and by them alone.

This is the logic of exclusion. I only lend if I can make sure the return will come back to me.

But the benefits of the essential are almost always diffuse. Collective. Shared.

A restored forest renders services to an entire watershed, to generations not yet born, to species that will never pay. An averted pandemic benefits everyone — which is to say, no one in particular. Fundamental research irrigates whole fields of knowledge, without its funder being able to confiscate the fruit.

The more widely a benefit is shared, the less appropriable it is. The less appropriable it is, the less it can underwrite a repayment.

The paradox of regenerative activities is that they are domains we all need collectively, but that no one in particular is willing to pay for!

The second lock therefore eliminates everything whose value is common.

Third lock: temporal compatibility

A credit has a horizon. A few years, sometimes a few decades for the longest. Repayment must occur within that horizon.

Yet the processes that produce the essential unfold over timescales that bear no relation to those of credit.

A living soil does not rebuild itself in five years. A mature forest takes decades to become one. The stability of a climate plays out over centuries. The resilience of an institution is built over generations.

Regeneration is slow by nature. It maintains, it reconstitutes, it accumulates patiently. Credit, by contrast, is in a hurry. It demands a return before its due date.

Between these two temporalities, there is no occasional disagreement. There is a structural incompatibility.

The third lock eliminates everything that matures too slowly.

Fourth lock: discounting

It is the most discreet, and perhaps the most implacable.

Even when a future benefit is monetizable, appropriable and compatible with the credit horizon, finance does not count it at its real value. It reduces it to its present value by means of a discount rate.

Yet discounting crushes the future.

A benefit expected in fifty years, brought back to today at a current rate, weighs almost nothing. Mathematically, the distant future tends toward zero.

This is what I have described elsewhere as the tragedy of horizons: our instrument of calculation literally renders invisible the most distant consequences of our actions. The more an activity protects a far horizon, the more discounting depreciates it. A catastrophe averted a century from now has, in today’s accounts, almost no value.

The fourth lock therefore eliminates everything that protects the long term.

The mesh of the filter

Let us now look at the four locks together.

Monetizability. Appropriability. Temporal compatibility. Positive discounting.

An activity becomes solvable only if it opens all four simultaneously.

And this is where everything is decided: the essential almost always fails on several locks at once.

A preserved forest produces no price, renders diffuse services, matures over decades, and concentrates its value in a future that discounting annuls. It fails on all four.

This is not a special case. It is the rule. Everything that pertains to the maintenance of the living, the preservation of the commons, the care of the long term, fails on this mesh.

The insolvency of the essential is therefore not an oversight. It is the logical and necessary consequence of the very definition of solvency.

The system is not mistaken. It does exactly what it was designed to do.

At this stage, a question remains. Why do the four locks seem to select, almost always, extractive activities rather than regenerative ones? Is it a mere historical accident? Or is there a deeper reason, inscribed in the laws of physics themselves?

Part Two — The thermodynamic signature

We could stop here. We would already have a solid mechanical explanation. But this question, precisely, remains open — and it is the most interesting one.

It is not a coincidence. It is a signature. A thermodynamic signature.

Money follows the flow, the flow follows entropy

Let us return to the first lock: to be solvable, one must produce a monetary flow. And a monetary flow is born, almost always, of a transformation. We sell what we have transformed.

But to transform, in the physical sense, is to degrade. It is to convert an ordered, concentrated, low-entropy stock into dissipated products and high-entropy waste.

A deposit, a forest, an aquifer, a reserve of fossil energy: these are stocks of low entropy. Accumulated order. To exploit them is to liquidate them. And liquidating a stock produces, in the same movement, goods to sell — and therefore a flow of money.

Extraction is solvable because it liquidates. It converts a patiently constituted natural capital into immediate revenue.

This is the founding intuition of Frederick Soddy, extended by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and then by Herman Daly: the economy is not a closed circuit turning upon itself. It is a thermodynamic process. It draws low entropy from the biosphere and rejects high entropy. The wealth-as-flow we measure is, in large part, the product of this degradation.

Regeneration liquidates nothing — and therefore yields nothing

Now let us reverse the reasoning.

What does a regenerative activity do?

It liquidates no stock. On the contrary: it maintains it, reconstitutes it, keeps it in order. A soil that is regenerated remains a soil. A forest that is preserved remains a forest. An institution that is maintained simply keeps functioning.

Yet maintaining a low-entropy stock produces no liquidable flow. Nothing comes out that can be sold. The value created takes the form of a maintenance — of a degradation that did not occur, of a collapse that did not happen.

And an averted collapse has no price. It appears in no account.

Economists call commons the indispensable resources on which society as a whole depends, but whose preservation no private actor can reasonably ensure alone. The climate, the oceans, aquifers, forests, biodiversity, but also certain human commons such as fundamental research, public health or scientific knowledge.

The commons? They are what everyone wrecks because it pays, and what no one repairs because it costs!

There is the signature. The insolvable essential is not a moral category. It is the monetary shadow of the second principle of thermodynamics.

The activities that produce a monetary flow are, overwhelmingly, those that produce entropy — that dissipate a pre-existing order. The activities that do not are those that maintain low entropy — the living world, soils, intact ecosystems, institutions, accumulated knowledge.

Our monetary architecture, by creating money only for what generates a repayable flow, structurally finances the production of entropy and starves the maintenance of negentropy.

This is not an ideological bias of the market. It is a physical coupling between the creation of money and the throughput of matter and energy that runs through the economy.

The first curse

This is exactly what I designate, in NEMO IMS, as the first of the three monetary curses: mechanical extraction.

Our money is mechanically tied to the liquidation of natural capital. Not because actors are malicious, but because the condition of solvency selects the flow, and the flow follows degradation.

As long as money is born of repayment, it will be born preferentially of what sells. And what sells is, most often, what has been extracted.

The insolvable essential is the exact reverse of this curse. What money cannot finance is precisely what does not degrade fast enough to produce a flow.

We can now state it.

The insolvable-essential theorem Any monetary architecture founded exclusively on the repayment of debts preferentially selects activities able to rapidly liquidate stocks of monetizable value, and tends, by construction, to exclude the activities that regenerate the commons, whose value is diffuse, slow and non-appropriable.

Part Three — Why the false solutions fail

Once the mechanism is laid bare, one understands why the usual remedies disappoint. They all commit the same error. They all accept the filter of solvency and try to force the essential through it.

Putting a price on nature

This is the most widespread temptation: if the essential fails on the first lock for lack of a price, let us give it one. Let us value ecosystem services. Let us make people pay for what nature renders freely.

The intention is understandable. The result backfires.

For to attribute a price to an ecosystem is to make it exchangeable. And to make it exchangeable is to open the possibility of liquidating it to whoever will draw the best flow from it. We have not saved the essential from the market: we have brought it in. We have made it solvable by making it extractable.

The monetization of nature does not dissolve the lock. It extends it.

Carbon markets and payments for services

The same limits, in another form. These devices create artificial flows to remunerate what produced none. But these flows remain suspended on a fragile political will, depend on a contestable measurement, and remain infinitely weaker than the flows generated by the extraction they are meant to offset.

We create a remuneration net at the margin, while the main machine keeps running at full power in the other direction.

Green finance and ESG criteria

So-called green finance never touches the insolvable essential. By construction.

It redirects the solvable toward what is a little less harmful. It prefers a profitable, virtuous investment to a profitable, destructive one. That is better than nothing. But it remains subject to the requirement of financial return. It moves within the domain of the solvable. It never crosses its border.

Yet the essential lies, by definition, on the other side of that border.

Taxation

Taxation seems to escape the logic of repayment. It does not.

For taxation levies on a prior economic activity. It draws on flows that already exist. And those flows, as we have seen, come mostly from extraction.

In other words, the tax base is itself the product of the extractive economy. To finance regeneration through taxation amounts to making it dependent on the destruction it is supposed to repair. We finance the care with the proceeds of the wound.

Regeneration then remains structurally downstream. Always second. Always conditioned on the prosperity of what it ought to replace.

Public debt

There remains public borrowing. But a debt remains a debt. It reintroduces, at the scale of the State, the very requirement that made the essential insolvable: a future repayment, backed by future flows, subject to the markets and their judgment.

We have merely shifted the lock by one notch. We have not opened it.

The common error

All these solutions share a presupposition they never question: that the essential must become solvable in order to be financed.

They accept the filter. They try to force through it what, by nature, does not pass.

But if the insolvency of the essential follows from the very definition of solvency, then no effort to render the essential solvable can succeed without denaturing it.

The lock is not in the activities. It is in the filter.

The only coherent way out is therefore not to make the essential cross the filter. It is to create a channel of money creation that does not pass through that filter at all.

Up to here, we have done nothing but analyze the problem.

We now know why the essential remains insolvable.

One decisive question remains.

How can we finance what will never be able to become solvable without being denatured?

Part Four — NEMO IMS: decoupling money creation from solvency

This is exactly the gesture NEMO IMS proposes. Not to make the essential solvable. But to stop requiring it to be.

The central gesture: a debt-free money

If insolvency is born of the requirement of repayment, then we need a money that does not carry that requirement.

A money issued without debt. A money that does not have to return, increased by interest, within a constrained horizon, to the exclusive benefit of a lender.

As soon as a monetary issuance calls for no repayment, the four locks fall together. The financed activity no longer needs to produce a price, nor to capture its benefits, nor to keep a schedule, nor to survive discounting. It no longer has to be solvable, because it is no longer asked to repay anything.

The lock is not forced. It is bypassed.

Anchoring money in regeneration, not in debt

But a debt-free money immediately raises a question: without the discipline of repayment, what justifies its issuance? What stops it from becoming a mere printing press, disconnected from the real?

NEMO IMS’s answer is to shift the anchor.

In the current system, money is anchored in debt: it is born of a credit, pledged on the promise of a future flow. NEMO IMS anchors it elsewhere: in regenerative activity itself, measured for what it maintains or reconstitutes.

What justifies the issuance is no longer the capacity to repay, but the contribution to the robustness of the system — its capacity to maintain the very conditions that make the economy possible.

The inversion is radical. Under the old logic, regeneration was a burden, financed with great difficulty out of the proceeds of destruction. Under NEMO IMS, regeneration becomes what grounds money creation. It is no longer the line item one cuts. It becomes the anchor.

An example. A team restores 500 hectares of mangrove. Today this activity is a burden. With NEMO IMS, it becomes the very support of monetary issuance. Money is no longer created because a debt is contracted, but because a common has effectively been regenerated.

Preventing drift: monetary melts

A debt-free money issued without any counterpart of destruction would end up accumulating as permanent excess. We therefore need a regulating mechanism that is not repayment.

This is the role of monetary melts — a form of demurrage, heir to the intuitions of Silvio Gesell, but carried down to the level of the transaction.

The money destined for the commons is not designed to accumulate indefinitely. It melts. It destroys itself progressively in circulation, through use. The monetary destruction that the old system operated through repayment is here integrated directly into the functioning of the money itself.

Credit destroyed money by demanding its return. The melt destroys it by keeping it circulating. In both cases the mass is regulated — but the second mechanism requires no prior solvency.

Two regimes: the dual Yin/Yang circuit of Finance

None of this means the abolition of the market or of classical credit. There exists a domain, a vast one, where the logic of solvency remains pertinent: that of market activities that really do produce flows, and that credit knows how to finance correctly.

NEMO IMS therefore does not suppress this domain. It delimits it.

This is the principle of the dual Yin/Yang circuit of Finance: two distinct regimes of money creation, each obeying its own logic.

A market finance (Yang) is degenerative and generates financial, private, short-term profits. A finance of the commons (Yin) is regenerative and generates diffuse, collective, long-term benefits.

On one side, then, the Yang circuit: backed by solvable activities, close in its functioning to what we know. On the other, the Yin circuit: debt-free, subject to the melts, anchored in regeneration, and dedicated precisely to everything the first circuit cannot finance.

The two circuits do not compete. They complement each other. One does what it knows how to do — finance the solvable. The other takes charge of what the first abandons — the insolvable essential. What was until now a blind spot becomes the proper domain of a circuit designed for it.

To try to finance diffuse, collective, long-term benefits with an instrument designed to maximize private, short-term profits amounts to using a hammer to drive a screw.

It is not the hammer that is bad. It is the tool that is unsuited to the task.

The international scale

This doubling holds only if it is protected at the international scale, failing which a debt-free circuit would be immediately sanctioned by monetary competition and by the Triffin dilemma.

This is why NEMO IMS is not only a national architecture, but an international monetary system: with its regenerative reserve instruments — the NEMO Green SDRs — and its exchange standard, which allow the finance of the commons to exist without being immediately punished by external markets.

I will not develop this international dimension here, which deserves a text of its own. I only wish to underline that it is necessary: one cannot durably finance the insolvable in a single country if the rest of the world keeps rewarding only the solvable.

Conclusion — The lock was a definition

We set out from an observation: the essential is insolvable.

We have learned that it is so not by chance, but by construction. Solvency is a filter with four locks — monetizability, appropriability, temporal compatibility, discounting — and the essential fails on these locks not for lack of value, but from an excess of value that is diffuse, slow and distant.

We have seen that this filter follows a physical frontier: it rewards the liquidation of low-entropy stocks and ignores their maintenance. The insolvable essential is the monetary shadow of the second principle of thermodynamics.

We have seen, finally, why all the solutions that try to render the essential solvable fail or denature it: the lock is not in the activities, it is in the filter.

One question then remains, and it is not the one we think.

The question was never: “where do we find the money?” Money is created every day, by the thousands of billions. The real question is: what does our money creation select for?

As long as it selects solvency, it will finance the liquidation of the world and leave its maintenance without means. This is not a fatality. It is a choice of architecture.

And a choice of architecture can be remade.

The insolvable essential exists only in a system that requires the essential to be solvable. The day money creation stops posing that requirement, the category itself will disappear. Not because we will at last have found the money. But because we will have stopped asking what keeps us alive to prove first that it knows how to pay.

For nearly two centuries, we have asked of each activity: “Will you yield enough to repay a debt?”

This question made it possible to build the modern economy.

But it can no longer be the only one.

The 21st century now obliges us to pose a second: “Do you allow the conditions of life to be maintained?”

The economics of equilibrium does not replace the first question. It completes it.

For a civilization cannot durably prosper if it knows perfectly how to finance what pays…

…but remains incapable of financing what makes it possible.

Jean-Christophe Duval

Capitalism is often presented as the natural product of entrepreneurial spirit, individual freedom, or humanity’s innate propensity to trade. Money, meanwhile, is supposed to be a simple technical instrument — neutral and passive, tasked with facilitating transactions without influencing their nature.

Monetary systems are never mere accounting infrastructure. They organize power relations, steer investment, reward certain behaviors and penalize others. In other words, they progressively select the most advantageous economic strategies — until those strategies shape the social norms and beliefs that justify them.

Contemporary capitalism is therefore not merely the product of an ideology. It is also the outcome of a monetary architecture that structurally favors capital accumulation, wealth concentration, and the reproduction of relations of domination.

This architecture is all the more powerful because it presents itself as neutral. Its mechanisms become invisible, its constraints are perceived as natural laws, and the inequalities it produces appear to be the inevitable consequences of merit or economic efficiency.

To understand why certain reforms are systematically dismissed as unrealistic before they are even discussed, we need to move past the false debate over whether ideology shapes money or money shapes ideology.

The reality is subtler: the two build each other in a permanent feedback loop, where each generation inherits institutions it never chose, adapts its behavior to their constraints, and eventually comes to believe that this behavior reflects human nature itself.

It is this loop — invisible yet extraordinarily robust — that this article sets out to analyze.

Graphique de concentration de la richesse mondiale

Graphique de concentration de la richesse mondiale

A Tool That Quietly Decides Who Wins and Who Loses

Let’s start from the beginning. A monetary system is not neutral plumbing laid beneath an economy that otherwise obeys independent laws. It is a selection device. Through its rules of creation, circulation, and remuneration of money, it decides which economic strategies become profitable and which become self-defeating.

When money creation runs almost exclusively through private bank credit — over 90% of the money supply in advanced economies today — the system does not simply “facilitate” economic activity. It actively selects agents who already hold collateral, already hold wealth, already have access to cheap credit. It favors them a little more with every cycle than the last. This is not an accidental bias in the system: it is its sorting function, built into the architecture itself.

Capital doesn’t need ideology to accumulate in such a system. It only needs to follow its incentives.

The Invisible Mechanism: How Architecture Becomes Narrative

Here is what makes this device so hard to challenge: once in place, it produces its own justifications.

Take the Cantillon effect. When a central bank injects massive liquidity — through quantitative easing, for instance — this new money doesn’t land evenly across the economy. It first reaches those already closest to the tap: financial institutions, asset holders, large listed companies. Stock and real-estate prices inflate before inflation reaches the everyday consumption basket of ordinary households. The wealth of some grows before the purchasing power of others even begins to erode.

Generation after generation, this mechanism produces a social reality in which asset holders grow richer “naturally” while wage earners struggle to keep up. And once installed, this reality generates its own narrative: stock valuation becomes a sign of “value creation,” wage stagnation becomes a matter of “competitiveness” or “individual productivity.” The architecture produced the inequality; the normalized inequality produced the story that absolves it.the Bretton Woods Conference, 1944 — the moment global monetary architecture was chosen by a handful of hands

Lord John Maynard Keynes

The Bretton Woods Conference, 1944 — the moment global monetary architecture was chosen by a handful of hands

When Bailing Out Becomes a Law of Nature

The second pillar of this mechanism is the asymmetry of risk. In booms, private financial institutions capture the profits of their boldest bets. In busts — and crises are structurally built into a deregulated fractional-reserve system, not accidental — the state and the central bank step in to prevent the collapse of institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

The cost of these bailouts doesn’t vanish. It shifts: onto public debt, onto the austerity that follows, onto public services trimmed to “restore the accounts.” The ruling class captures the gains at the top of the cycle and socializes the losses at the bottom. This isn’t a malfunction of financial capitalism — it is its normal mode of operation, one that the current monetary architecture permits and, in a sense, organizes.

And because this mechanism repeats every generation, it eventually comes to seem self-evident. “Too big to fail” is no longer perceived as a contestable political choice, but as a technical fatality no responsible government could ignore.

False Neutrality as the Ultimate Ideological Weapon

This is where the loop closes. A monetary architecture that structurally favors capital accumulation does not hold its power through force — it holds its power through invisibility. As long as it is perceived as a simple technical tool, neutral, outside the political realm, it escapes all democratic challenge. We don’t debate the laws of physics. We endure them.

This is why the Mundell trilemma, the Basel III prudential ratios, or the international hierarchy of the dollar (62% of global currency reserves) are presented as unavoidable technical constraints, never as the political choices they actually are. This is why France in 1983, faced with capital flight and the depletion of its currency reserves, experienced its “austerity turn” not as an ideological decision but as an accounting necessity. The architecture had already made the choice; the government merely acted out its consequences.

Gold reserves in a central bank vault

Breaking the Loop: Why the Architecture Must Change, Not Just the Discourse

This diagnosis carries a direct consequence for anyone who genuinely wants to change the system: it is not enough to denounce financial capitalism on the terrain of ideas alone. As long as the monetary architecture keeps rewarding speculative accumulation and socializing losses, it will keep producing — over and over — the material conditions that make this ideology unquestionable, no matter how loud the critical discourse opposing it.

This is the whole stakes of a structural monetary reform like NEMO IMS. The goal is not to moralize capital, but to change the rules of the game it responds to:

• a monetary melt (demurrage) that penalizes speculative hoarding rather than rewarding it;

• a structural separation between flows that finance the regenerative real economy and those that feed pure speculation, through differential interest rates;

• an international settlement architecture built as a mesh rather than a hierarchy around a pivot currency, so that external constraint stops being the silent weapon used to discipline peoples in the name of “stability.”

Changing the architecture means changing the incentives. Changing the incentives means, eventually, changing the narratives born from their effects. It is the only way to step outside the loop instead of continuing to comment on it from within.

Money has never been neutral. It is the quietest and most effective weapon of the class that writes its rules — precisely because it passes itself off as technical infrastructure. Unmasking it is the first step. Redesigning it is the next.

The Economy Of Balance.

Money, Finance and Planetary Boundaries.

Further reading

The Economy of Balance — Money, Finance and Planetary Boundaries, my essay (Debunk’Onomy Ed., June 2026, €9.90), develops this diagnosis in full depth alongside the complete NEMO IMS architecture: 269 pages, from the case against debt-money to the detailed macroprudential design.

After months of research and writing, I am pleased to announce that The Economy of Balance: Money, Finance and Planetary Boundaries is now available in English.

The book explores a simple but powerful idea:

Many of the world’s ecological, economic and social crises are not accidental. They are the logical consequences of the monetary architecture we have inherited.

It introduces NEMO IMS (NEgentropic Money International Monetary System), a proposal for a monetary framework designed to reward regeneration rather than extraction, robustness rather than endless growth, and long-term resilience rather than short-term profit.

This is not just a book about economics.

It is an invitation to rethink the foundations of our civilization and to imagine a monetary system compatible with the limits of our planet.

If you are interested in ecological economics, monetary reform, systems thinking or the future of public policy, I hope this work will spark reflection and debate.

🌍 The English edition is available here (Only PDF for now) :
https://debunkonomy.org/en/book/

I would be grateful if you could share it with anyone interested in building a more sustainable and resilient economic future.

#Economics #EcologicalEconomics #MonetaryReform #Sustainability #Degrowth #Climate #Finance #NEMOIMS #Debunkonomy

This article develops a thread central to Debunk’Onomy: the ecological transition is not primarily a moral problem — it is a problem of institutional design. It draws on the work of Karl Polanyi, Douglas North and Pierre Bourdieu, and converges on the logic of the NEMO IMS monetary system.

We live in a society fascinated by individual transformation. Behavioural therapies, awareness campaigns, nudges, self-improvement, injunctions to “change our habits”: everything seems to suggest that the ecological, social and economic transition depends above all on our ability to become better citizens, better consumers or better leaders.

Yet despite decades of discourse and pedagogical effort, collective behaviours evolve slowly, fragile and often reversible.

What institutionalists understood long ago

This intuition is not new.

Karl Polanyi showed that markets are not natural realities emerging spontaneously from human psychology. They are institutional constructions, made possible by laws, conventions, property rights, monetary rules and political choices. Changing these rules means changing the very operation of the market.

Douglas North, Nobel laureate in economics, defined institutions as the “rules of the game” that structure human interactions. Their function is to reduce uncertainty — but above all to determine which behaviours are rewarded and which are discouraged. Individuals respond less to abstract moral principles than to the incentive structures within which they operate.

Pierre Bourdieu, from a different angle, argued that our habitus — that way of perceiving the world and acting that feels natural to us — is largely the product of the social structures we have internalised. What we sometimes call personality is often nothing more than the lasting imprint left by the institutions in which we grew up.

It is men who create institutions. Then institutions create men.

Three examples to move beyond abstraction

Take a classroom. Without explicit rules, noise rises quickly, interactions become chaotic and everyone follows immediate impulses. Introduce a clear framework, protocols for speaking and an organised space, and the same children instantly adopt very different behaviours. Their nature has not changed. Only the rules have.

A roundabout instantly transforms driving behaviour — no speeches, no guilt required. Architecture 1, pedagogy 0.

Consider a road junction. For years, authorities multiplied prevention campaigns and reminders about caution. Accidents persisted. Then came the roundabout. By simply modifying the physical architecture of the intersection, behaviours changed almost immediately — without convincing anyone, without blaming anyone.

Look finally at environmental taxation. A carbon tax influences investment decisions far more effectively than an appeal to environmental responsibility. A tax credit can direct billions towards energy renovation. Binding emissions standards transform industrial strategies far more efficiently than voluntary charters. In every case, rules precede behaviours — and shape them.

−40% Serious accidents at junctions after conversion to roundabouts (UK Dept. for Transport)

×3 Renewable energy investment multiplier with tax incentives vs. voluntary commitments

97% Of money in circulation created through bank credit, not central banks (Bank of England, 2014)

Biology teaches a similar lesson. Species adapt to their environment. Modify that environment and you progressively modify the behaviours selected for. Institutions represent, for human societies, a comparable environment: they select certain strategies and discourage others.

Money: a social construction with very real effects

Among all human institutions, money occupies a singular place. It is often presented as a simple instrument of exchange. In reality, it is a social construction — and because we collectively place our trust in it, it organises our priorities, our economic calculations and even our representation of progress.

Money is not neutral.

Because it is today predominantly created as interest-bearing debt, it favours activities capable of generating monetary flows quickly enough to ensure repayment. This architecture naturally directs investment towards quantitative growth, financial valorisation and the exploitation of resources whose environmental costs remain largely invisible.

Current monetary architecture

This is an institutional architecture inherited from centuries of history, designed to finance economic expansion — not to preserve the planet’s ecological balances. To ask economic actors to spontaneously favour sobriety is to ask drivers to go the wrong way down a one-way street. A few will do so out of conviction. The majority will follow the implicit rules of the system.

Why is it so difficult to change the rules?

If institutions shape behaviour with such efficiency, why do public debates focus almost exclusively on individuals?

The first reason is ideological. For two centuries, mainstream economic thinking has often presented the market as a natural phenomenon that should be left to operate freely. To acknowledge that rules manufacture behaviour is to acknowledge that the economy is, above all, a political construction.

The second reason concerns established interests. Every institutional architecture creates winners. Those who benefit from existing rules have a natural interest in maintaining them, and resist changes that might undermine their advantages.

The third reason is cognitive. It is infinitely simpler to blame a consumer than to explain the mechanisms of money creation, taxation or incentive structures. Individual morality is far more media-friendly than institutional analysis.

The ecological transition is not primarily a moral problem

This is where Debunk’Onomy plants its flag.

The ecological crisis does not reflect a sudden moral degradation of humanity. Human beings respond, as they always have, to the incentives produced by their institutional environment. Today, that environment still largely rewards resource extraction, the externalisation of environmental costs and immediate consumption.

Durably changing behaviours therefore requires changing the rules of the game. The question is not whether such a transformation is desirable — it manifestly is. The question is which institutional architecture could make it possible.

This is precisely the logic that inspires NEMO IMS. By orienting money creation towards ecological and social regeneration rather than financial accumulation, such a system would modify the incentive structure. Restoring soils, strengthening territorial resilience or preserving ecosystems would progressively become economically advantageous. Capital, talent and innovation would then follow these new signals — not because individuals had become more virtuous, but because the rules had changed.

Mangrove restoration in Sri Lanka. When the rules reward regeneration, capital follows. Source: UNDP / UN Decade on Restoration

This is the very principle of any effective institution: change the rules, change the game.

What humanity truly lacks

Good intentions, scientific knowledge and the necessary technologies already exist. What is still missing are institutions capable of making these aspirations economically rational.

As long as the rules reward predation, predation will thrive — not through vice, but through logic. When the rules reward cooperation, ecosystem restoration and territorial robustness, these behaviours will cease to be individual sacrifices or acts of militancy. They will simply become the most natural way to act.

We long believed that institutions had to adapt to human nature. Perhaps we must now understand that human nature adapts above all to the institutions we build.

The true political question is no longer: how do we make people better?

It has become: what rules would allow ordinary people to collectively build a better world?

Debunk’Onomy — Deconstructing economics to rebuild the world. · debunkonomy.org

Cet article prolonge un fil de réflexion central à Debunk’Onomy : la transition écologique n’est pas d’abord un problème moral, mais un problème de conception institutionnelle. Il s’appuie sur les travaux de Karl Polanyi, Douglas North et Pierre Bourdieu, et converge vers la logique du système NEMO IMS.

Nous vivons dans une société fascinée par la transformation individuelle. Thérapies comportementales, campagnes de sensibilisation, nudges, développement personnel, injonctions à « changer nos habitudes » : tout semble indiquer que la transition écologique, sociale ou économique dépend avant tout de notre capacité à devenir de meilleurs citoyens, de meilleurs consommateurs ou de meilleurs dirigeants.

Pourtant, malgré des décennies de discours et d’efforts pédagogiques, les comportements collectifs évoluent lentement, de manière fragile et souvent réversible.

Ce que les institutionnalistes ont compris depuis longtemps

Cette intuition n’est pas nouvelle.

Karl Polanyi avait montré que les marchés ne sont pas des réalités naturelles émergeant spontanément de la psychologie humaine. Ils sont des constructions institutionnelles, rendues possibles par des lois, des conventions, des droits de propriété, des règles monétaires et des choix politiques. Modifier ces règles revient à modifier le fonctionnement même du marché.

Douglas North, prix Nobel d’économie, définissait les institutions comme les « règles du jeu » qui structurent les interactions humaines. Leur fonction est de réduire l’incertitude, mais surtout de déterminer quels comportements sont récompensés et lesquels sont découragés. Les individus répondent moins à des principes moraux abstraits qu’aux structures d’incitation dans lesquelles ils évoluent.

Pierre Bourdieu, de son côté, expliquait que notre habitus — cette manière de percevoir le monde et d’agir qui nous paraît naturelle — est largement le produit des structures sociales que nous avons intériorisées. Ce que nous appelons parfois notre personnalité n’est souvent que l’empreinte durable laissée par les institutions dans lesquelles nous avons grandi.

Ce sont les hommes qui créent les institutions. Puis les institutions créent les hommes.

Trois exemples pour sortir de l’abstraction

Prenons une salle de classe. Sans règles explicites, le bruit monte rapidement, les interactions deviennent chaotiques et chacun suit ses impulsions immédiates. Introduisez un cadre clair, des protocoles de prise de parole et une organisation de l’espace, et les mêmes enfants adoptent instantanément des comportements très différents. Leur nature n’a pas changé. Seules les règles ont changé.

Un rond-point modifie instantanément les comportements sans discours ni culpabilisation. Architecture 1, pédagogie 0.

Considérons maintenant un carrefour routier. Pendant des années, les autorités ont multiplié les campagnes de prévention et les rappels à la prudence. Les accidents persistaient. Puis vint le rond-point. En modifiant simplement l’architecture physique de l’intersection, les comportements ont changé presque immédiatement — sans convaincre personne, sans culpabiliser personne.

Regardons enfin la fiscalité environnementale. Une taxe carbone influence davantage les choix d’investissement qu’un appel à la responsabilité environnementale. Un crédit d’impôt peut orienter des milliards d’euros vers la rénovation énergétique. Des normes d’émissions contraignantes transforment les stratégies industrielles bien plus efficacement que des chartes volontaires. Dans tous ces cas, ce sont les règles qui précèdent les comportements — et les façonnent.

• −40 % Accidents graves aux carrefours après conversion en ronds-points (CEREMA, France)

• ×3 Investissements dans les énergies renouvelables avec crédit d’impôt vs sans incitation fiscale

• 97 % De la monnaie en circulation créée par le crédit bancaire, non par les banques centrales

La biologie nous enseigne d’ailleurs une leçon similaire. Les espèces s’adaptent à leur environnement. Modifier cet environnement modifie progressivement les comportements sélectionnés. Les institutions constituent, pour les sociétés humaines, un environnement comparable : elles sélectionnent certaines stratégies et en découragent d’autres.

La monnaie : une construction sociale qui produit des effets bien réels

Parmi toutes les institutions humaines, la monnaie occupe une place singulière. Elle est souvent présentée comme un simple instrument d’échange. En réalité, elle constitue une construction sociale — et parce que nous lui accordons collectivement notre confiance, elle organise nos priorités, nos calculs économiques et jusqu’à notre représentation du progrès.

La monnaie n’est pas neutre.

Parce qu’elle est aujourd’hui majoritairement créée sous forme de dette portant intérêt, elle favorise les activités capables de générer rapidement des flux monétaires suffisants pour assurer leur remboursement. Cette architecture oriente naturellement les investissements vers la croissance quantitative, la valorisation financière et l’exploitation des ressources dont les coûts environnementaux demeurent largement invisibles.

Architecture monétaire actuelle

Il s’agit d’une architecture institutionnelle héritée de plusieurs siècles d’histoire, conçue pour financer l’expansion économique, non pour préserver les équilibres écologiques de la planète. Dès lors, demander aux acteurs économiques de privilégier spontanément la sobriété revient à demander aux automobilistes de rouler à contresens. Quelques-uns le feront par conviction. La majorité suivra les règles implicites du système.

Pourquoi est-il si difficile de changer les règles ?

Si les institutions façonnent les comportements avec autant d’efficacité, pourquoi les débats publics se concentrent-ils presque exclusivement sur les individus ?

Une première raison est idéologique. Depuis deux siècles, la pensée économique dominante présente souvent le marché comme un phénomène naturel qu’il conviendrait de laisser fonctionner librement. Reconnaître que les règles fabriquent les comportements revient à rappeler que l’économie est avant tout une construction politique.

Une deuxième raison est liée aux intérêts établis. Toute architecture institutionnelle crée des gagnants. Ceux qui bénéficient des règles existantes ont naturellement intérêt à leur maintien et résistent aux transformations susceptibles de remettre en cause leurs avantages.

Enfin, une troisième raison est cognitive. Il est infiniment plus simple de culpabiliser un consommateur que d’expliquer les mécanismes de la création monétaire, de la fiscalité ou des structures d’incitation. La morale individuelle est médiatiquement plus accessible que l’analyse institutionnelle.

La transition écologique n’est pas d’abord un problème moral

C’est ici que se situe l’ambition de Debunk’Onomy.

La crise écologique ne traduit pas une soudaine dégradation morale de l’humanité. Les êtres humains répondent, comme ils l’ont toujours fait, aux incitations produites par leur environnement institutionnel. Aujourd’hui, ce dernier récompense encore largement l’extraction des ressources, l’externalisation des coûts environnementaux et la consommation immédiate.

Changer durablement les comportements suppose donc de modifier les règles du jeu. La question n’est pas de savoir si une telle transformation est souhaitable — elle l’est manifestement. La question est de savoir quelle architecture institutionnelle pourrait la rendre possible.

C’est précisément la logique qui inspire NEMO IMS. En orientant la création monétaire vers des objectifs de régénération écologique et sociale plutôt que vers l’accumulation financière, un tel système modifierait la structure des incitations. Restaurer des sols, renforcer la résilience des territoires ou préserver les écosystèmes deviendrait progressivement économiquement avantageux. Les capitaux, les talents et les innovations suivraient alors ces nouveaux signaux — non parce que les individus seraient devenus plus vertueux, mais parce que les règles auraient changé.

Restauration de mangroves au Sri Lanka. Quand les règles récompensent la régénération, les capitaux suivent. Source : PNUD / UN Decade on Restoration

C’est le principe même de toute institution efficace : changer les règles, c’est changer le jeu.

Ce dont l’humanité manque vraiment

Les bonnes intentions, les connaissances scientifiques et les technologies nécessaires existent. Ce qui manque encore, ce sont des institutions capables de rendre ces aspirations économiquement rationnelles.

Tant que les règles récompensent la prédation, la prédation prospérera — non par vice, mais par logique. Lorsque les règles récompenseront la coopération, la restauration des écosystèmes et la robustesse des territoires, ces comportements cesseront d’être des sacrifices individuels ou des actes militants. Ils deviendront simplement la manière la plus naturelle d’agir.

Nous avons longtemps cru que les institutions devaient s’adapter à la nature humaine. Peut-être faut-il désormais comprendre que la nature humaine s’adapte surtout aux institutions que nous construisons.

La véritable question politique n’est donc plus : comment rendre les hommes meilleurs ?

Elle est devenue : quelles règles permettraient à des hommes ordinaires de construire collectivement un monde meilleur ?

Debunk’Onomy — Déconstruire l’économie pour reconstruire le monde. · debunkonomy.org

There is an intuition so deeply embedded in our industrial culture that it seems beyond question: if our technologies consume less energy per unit produced, the planet is better off. This conviction runs through political discourse, institutional reports, corporate strategies, and carbon neutrality commitments. It underpins what is called green growth. It is wrong.

Not for lack of goodwill. Not for lack of technical genius. But because it ignores two mutually reinforcing realities: the Jevons paradox on one side, the architecture of debt-money on the other. Understanding their interplay reveals why sobriety is structurally impossible in the current system — and why NEMO IMS (NEgentropic MOney International Monetary System) is not a cosmetic reform, but a fundamental break.

1865: Jevons Observes the Impossible

In 1865, British economist William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question. His observation was counter-intuitive: since James Watt’s steam engine had replaced Thomas Newcomen’s with far superior thermodynamic efficiency, national coal consumption had not fallen — it had exploded.

The mechanism is straightforward. A more efficient machine reduces the cost of energy per unit produced. Lower costs make production more competitive, drive down prices, stimulate demand, attract new uses, and generate new industries. The increase in total volume more than offsets unit-level savings. Between 1830 and 1863, while the fuel needed to produce a ton of iron fell by two-thirds, total coal consumption in the UK increased tenfold.

The Jevons paradox: technical efficiency, operating within a system that rewards the expansion of material flows, accelerates total consumption rather than reducing it.

This is not a historical anomaly. It is a systemic mechanism observable in every sector of the contemporary economy.

The Rebound Effect Is Everywhere

Economists Daniel Khazzoom and Leonard Brookes confirmed this in the 1980s: efficiency gains following the oil shocks did nothing to bend the curve of global energy demand, which continued its upward trajectory.

Sectoral examples are overwhelming. Automobiles: modern engines consume far less per kilometre, but vehicles have become heavier with the proliferation of SUVs, more numerous, and distances travelled have surged. Digital technology: microprocessors are infinitely more efficient per computation, but the near-zero marginal cost of data processing has ushered in an era of intensive consumption — streaming, artificial intelligence, data centres — whose energy footprint grows exponentially. Lighting: LEDs consume a fraction of incandescent bulbs, but the cost of light has fallen a hundredfold since 1900 — with the result that the planet grows brighter every night.

The conclusion is invariable: efficiency is necessary. It is radically insufficient without an absolute cap on total consumption.

The Decoupling Myth

Green growth postulates that continuous GDP growth can be accompanied by an absolute and durable fall in environmental pressures. To be credible, this absolute decoupling must be simultaneously global (without displacing impacts), total (covering all resources and pollution), permanent, and fast enough to remain compatible with planetary boundaries.

This decoupling has never been observed at the scale of a national economy over a sustained period without hidden externalisation. The European Environmental Bureau’s Decoupling Debunked report (2019) identifies the structural reasons: rising extraction costs as easy deposits are exhausted, generalised rebound effects, problem-shifting between sectors, thermodynamic limits of recycling, and insufficient innovation to phase out polluting technologies at the pace required.

The European case illustrates the statistical fraud: the EU shows falling territorial emissions while its GDP grows. But on a consumption footprint basis — which includes emissions embedded in imports — its real emissions exceed declared territorial emissions by 21%. The decoupling displayed by wealthy nations is largely a statistical construction enabled by globalisation: heavy industry is offshored, finished goods are imported, and only visible smokestacks are counted.

Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz documents with precision that the history of energy is not one of substitutions but of accumulations. Coal did not replace wood. Oil did not eliminate coal. Each new source was added to the previous ones. Today we consume more biomass and coal than at any point in human history.

The Question Green Growth Refuses to Ask

The green growth doctrine fails biophysically. But its deepest error is failing to ask the right question. It asks: how can we grow without destroying? The right question is: why must we grow?

This question leads directly to monetary architecture. Contemporary money is created through debt: commercial banks create money ex nihilo when they issue credit, requiring repayment of principal plus interest. To service that interest — which was not created at the time of the loan — more money must exist in the circuit than at the moment of borrowing. This requires new credit, hence new expansion. Growth is not an ideological choice. It is an arithmetic constraint embedded in the mechanism of money creation.

This hidden engine produces three systemic pathologies. Mechanical extraction: to prevent the global money supply from contracting under the weight of repayments, the flow of new credit must permanently exceed that of past debts. Each newly created unit of debt is a bill drawn on the biosphere — a promise of future extraction. To service approximately $315 trillion in accumulated global debt in 2024, the Earth is designated first payer. The selectivity of banking validation: banks do not allocate capital according to ecological utility, but according to short-term financial returns. Restoring a forest is an insolvent liability. Opening an open-pit mine generates predictable, solvent cash flows. The Gordian knot of finance and the biosphere: extractivism generates immediate, concentrated, liquid private profit. Regeneration produces diffuse, non-commercial, very long-term civilisational benefits. Stock market records rise as the biosphere’s regulatory functions collapse.

As long as monetary emission remains coupled to debt creation, sobriety is structurally impossible. The Jevons paradox is merely the visible symptom of a deeper monetary pathology.

NEMO IMS: Changing the Rules of the Game

Escaping the Jevons trap and breaking the cycle of compulsory growth requires more than behavioural sobriety incentives or greener technologies. It requires a radical transformation of international monetary institutions to orient economic signals toward the preservation of life. This is the ambition of NEMO IMS, conceived as an architectural break, not a marginal adjustment.

Gift-Money for the Insolvent Essential

NEMO IMS recognises what it calls the insolvent essential: activities fundamental to social resilience and ecological robustness — soil restoration, depollution, commons preservation — that generate no short-term financial profit and are therefore excluded by the market. To fund them, NEMO IMS creates a dedicated currency, free of debt and return obligations: gift-money. Unlike bank money that demands repayment with interest, it is injected directly to repair the biosphere, freeing actors from the imperative of destructive market profitability.

Transactional Melting as a Regulation Mechanism

Continuous injection of non-repayable currency could cause inflationary pressure. To stabilise the circuit without classical taxation, NEMO IMS introduces transactional melting: a physical destruction of monetary entries at each commercial transaction, adjusted dynamically through Fisher’s equation (MV = PT) and modulated by ecological criteria. Transactions involving highly destructive products carry a high melting rate, making such activities economically prohibitive. Regenerative activities enjoy zero or minimal melting, protecting their economic viability.

The NEMO Exchange Standard

At the international level, NEMO IMS replaces dollar hegemony with the NEMO Exchange Standard (NES): a neutral global unit of account serving as a reference for the direct conversion of national currencies. In international trade, currencies do not accumulate as foreign exchange reserves — they are destroyed on one side and created on the other at the NES rate. This scriptural mechanism eliminates the Triffin dilemma and the Mundell incompatibility triangle, allowing each nation to manage its ecological monetary creation sovereignly.

The GAÏA Nation and Ecological Entitlements

To allow countries of the Global South to balance their accounts without being forced to overexploit their forests or minerals, NEMO IMS introduces the GAÏA Nation: a virtual accounting entity representing the planet, centralising the billing of ecosystem services provided by each state to the international community. Countries receive NES units convertible into national currency in exchange for measurable, audited actions: carbon sequestration, biodiversity protection, hydrological regulation, soil restoration. Ecological restoration ceases to be a punitive cost and becomes the principal source of non-inflationary sovereign revenue for developing countries.

Comparing Monetary Architectures

Toward the Economy of Equilibrium

The Jevons paradox teaches us that technical efficiency, deployed within an economic framework that rewards the expansion of material flows, only accelerates ecosystem destruction. Technological innovation is necessary. It is radically insufficient.

Sobriety, often presented as a moral sacrifice or a drag on employment, is in reality rendered impossible by the architecture of debt-money, which demands infinite growth on a planet of finite resources. This is not a problem of collective will. It is a problem of institutional architecture.

For efficiency gains to genuinely benefit the resilience of the living world, the rules of the monetary game must be rebuilt. By decoupling monetary emission from debt creation, regulating inflation through transactional melting, and rewarding commons regeneration via the GAÏA Nation, NEMO IMS offers a concrete way out of the thermodynamic impasse.

The goal is not to reject technical progress. It is to subject the financial tool to the laws of physics and planetary limits — replacing the dogma of infinite expansion with the imperative of ecological robustness.

Seven of nine planetary boundaries have been breached. Not for lack of technology. Because the system’s internal logic is incompatible with the conditions for regenerating life.

This text draws on the work developed in The Economy of Equilibrium — Money, Finance and Planetary Boundaries, published by Éditions Debunk (June 2026).

Find out this article and many others at Debunk’Onomy

Discover the book Economy Of Balance

Jean-Christophe Duval

Entropy is the real cost of all production. And the genius — if one can call it that — of financial capitalism is to have succeeded in never entering it into the accounts.

The Physics That Economics Forgot to Read

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, an economist of rare lucidity, laid out the problem as early as 1971 in his seminal work The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. He demonstrated that all economic activity draws from a stock of low-entropy resources — concentrated minerals, fossil petroleum, fertile soils, fresh water — to produce high-entropy waste. This flow is unidirectional and irreversible. It does not loop. Infinite economic growth in a finite world is not a political vision: it is a physical impossibility.

Georgescu-Roegen has never been refuted. He was simply ignored by standard economics textbooks, which were too busy modeling perfectly balanced markets in a universe assumed to be without friction, without degradation, and without irreversible time. Physics does not negotiate with doctrines. It waits.

It was within this framework that Ronald Coase, in a 1997 interview, formulated with clinical coldness what mainstream economics teaches in more polite terms: economic agents do not pollute out of vice — they pollute because it is the cheapest way to produce something in a price system that never bills for degradation. Pollution is not an industrial accident. It is the rational consequence of an accounting system built on the invisibility of entropy.

The Profitability of Dissipation: Supporting Figures

If we map business models according to their entropic profile, a correlation emerges with brutal clarity: the more a model accelerates the dissipation of natural capital, the higher its operating margin.

In the energy sector, oil majors externalize the global climate cost of their hydrocarbons with formidable efficiency. In 2025, TotalEnergies generated an adjusted EBITDA of $40.5 billion, with a return on average capital employed of 12.6% — the best performance in its category. ExxonMobil generated $52 billion in operational cash flow, maintaining its production at historic levels thanks to the intensive exploitation of assets in Guyana and the Permian Basin. The profitability of these assets rests on a simple premise: the real cost of carbon emissions is never entered into their balance sheet.

In textiles, the ultra-fast fashion model demonstrates the exact same logic. Shein projects a net profit of $2 billion for 2025 — up from $1.1 billion in 2024 — by entirely externalizing the costs associated with microplastic and chemical pollution of waterways. Meanwhile, Dynamite Group boasts an adjusted EBITDA margin of 36.6% in 2025, with revenue growing at a compound annual rate of 20% over four years. These performances do not reflect superior productivity: they reflect a systematic externalization of the entropic cost onto society.

A 2026 study by the University of Surrey conducted on more than 2,800 listed companies across 61 countries confirms this: the firms that appear most financially efficient are often those with the most severe environmental inefficiencies once their true footprint is integrated into the analysis. Conventional profitability masks the actual level of global value destruction.

Defensive Sustainability: When Doing Good Costs Dearly

At the other end of the spectrum, companies attempting to limit their environmental impact collide with what can be called the virtuous margin paradox. They internalize the entropic cost that their competitors discard — and they pay for it in cash, unable to fully pass it on through their prices without risking an immediate erosion of their market share.

The statistic is well-known but remains edifying: while 65% of households declare a preference for eco-responsible brands, only 26% actually follow through with this preference during the act of purchase. Intention does not pay margins. Consumers overwhelmingly arbitrate in favor of price, which means that ecological virtue remains an uncompensated structural cost for the company practicing it.

Agriculture illustrates this fracture with surgical precision. Conventional agriculture maximizes its yields through intensive artificial capital — synthetic fertilizers, pesticides — which incurs high protection costs but guarantees stable volumes. The organic model eliminates these chemical inputs and reduces its protection costs to around €50/ha compared to €150/ha for conventional farming, but suffers structural yield drops of 35% for field crops and up to 50% for orchards, while requiring 5% to 10% more labor. Consequently, the inflationary crisis of 2022–2024 triggered a 12% drop in organic sales in supermarkets, the downgrading of 35% of organic milk to conventional prices, and the net loss of 110,000 hectares of organic farmland in two years.

Dominant assessment methods further aggravate this distortion. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) expresses impacts per kilogram of finished product, which artificially penalizes low-yield systems. Per unit of area, organic agriculture emits fewer greenhouse gases and preserves 30% more biodiversity. But when reported per kilogram of food, it appears less efficient — a metric that drives the decisions of major retailers and public policies against virtuous supply chains.

The Regenerative Model: Insolvency Encoded into Law

While defensive sustainability suffers from margin compression, regenerative models — those that do not merely degrade less but actively rebuild natural capital — face something far more radical: a structural insolvency legally imposed by law.

Instruments for remunerating ecosystem services — Payments for Environmental Services (PES), Agri-Environmental and Climate Measures — are strictly framed by WTO rules and the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). These regulations stipulate that compensating a farmer for green practices cannot constitute a disguised subsidy. As a result, remuneration is legally capped at the exact sum of additional operating costs and the shortfall resulting from decreased production. No margin. No premium. No reward for the value created for society.

A farmer who decides to dedicate a fraction of their land to restoring a wetland, re-establishing ecological corridors, or regenerating biodiversity receives exactly zero euros in net profit. They cover their costs and losses. They produce collective value — water purification, carbon storage, pollination, hydrological regulation — that benefits society for free. Yet, they cannot capture any fraction of it as income.

For a wheat producer transitioning to regenerative practices, adopting permanent cover crops and eliminating tillage causes a drop in profitability that can exceed 60% during the first two years. A return on investment of 15% to 25% is theoretically attainable after ten years — but financing the transition remains a major bottleneck in the absence of any risk-pooling mechanism.

Unlike extractive activities that convert degraded natural capital into distributable private margins, regenerative activities are structurally confined to the role of neutral cost centers. This is not a regulatory anomaly patchable at the margins. It is the accounting translation of a paradigm: economic value is tied to destruction, not regeneration.

This situation does not stem from a simple market failure. It is the product of a coherent causal chain. First, externalities allow extractive activities to transfer a large portion of their real costs onto society, making destruction artificially profitable. Second, bank credit preferentially directs capital toward activities capable of rapidly generating monetary flows to repay debt and interest. In this context, the most rapidly monetizable activities — often the most physically dissipative ones — enjoy a structural advantage. Conversely, regenerative activities produce diffuse, collective, and long-term benefits that struggle to be converted into market income. They find themselves systematically disadvantaged in the competition for access to finance. This bias is not accidental: it results from the interplay between a price system that ignores most entropic costs and a monetary system that privileges the fastest-monetizing activities.

The Root of the Problem: A Currency Built on Entropy

Why does this system persist despite the accumulation of evidence, reports, and crises? Because the asymmetry is not a bug repairable by a few regulatory tweaks. It is an architectural property of the monetary system itself.

Contemporary money is created through bank credit. It is born as debt — and debt demands repayment with interest. This means that every monetary unit in circulation requires, somewhere in the system, the production of additional value to honor that interest. This logic is inherently expansionist. It drives the permanent growth of the production flow — and therefore, thermodynamically, the permanent increase of the entropy flow.

Within this framework, the activities that generate monetary value the fastest — meaning those that dissipate natural capital the quickest — best satisfy the requirements of debt. They repay quickly. They distribute dividends. They attract capital. Regenerative activities, on the other hand, rebuild natural capital at a biological pace — slow, non-linear, difficult to quantify — and structurally fail to meet the profitability demands of financial capital.

We will not solve this problem by adding green labels, insufficient carbon taxes, or ESG funds that continue to covertly finance fossil assets. These instruments merely tinker with incentives at the margins. They do not change the fundamental price signal: destroying is profitable, regenerating is insolvent, because money itself was built on dissipation.

Degenerative activities generate short-term financial profits. Regenerative activities generate non-market, diffuse, unquantifiable, collective, and long-term benefits. Our dilemma is that only the former can be assimilated by the market.

NEMO IMS: Inverting the Thermodynamic Signal of Money

It is precisely at this architectural root that the NEMO IMS (Negentropic Money International Monetary System) project strikes. The core idea is simple to state, yet radical to operationalize: anchor money creation in the regeneration of living systems, rather than in debt-driven growth.

Under the NEMO IMS framework, money is not created as a counterpart to a debt to be repaid with interest. It is issued as a counterpart to the measurable and certifiable restoration of natural capital — rebuilding living soil, reforestation, wetland restoration, biodiversity recovery. These regenerative activities thus become the thermodynamic collateral of the monetary system: they anchor value in negentropy, in the reconstitution of complex biological order.

This reversal structurally resolves the asymmetry described in this article. If money is created by regeneration, then regenerating is no longer a cost: it becomes a source of liquidity. The zero-margin constraint of current PES (Payments for Ecosystem Services) is not an economic fatality. It is the symptom of a monetary system unsuited to the thermodynamics of living systems.

The key instrument is the NEMO Green SDR (Special Drawing Right) — a supranational monetary unit issued against the certified regeneration of natural commons. It offers regenerative operators — farmers, forest managers, ecosystem restorers — an inverted price signal: the more you rebuild, the more liquidity you generate. Thermodynamics and economics finally cease to contradict each other.

What Physics Tells Us That Economics Refuses to Hear

The data is there. The logic is implacable. There is a structural and systemic asymmetry between the profitability of models that destroy and the insolvency of those that regenerate. This asymmetry is not a market error correctable by a few tax reforms. It is encoded into the architecture of the monetary system and into the accounting conventions that allow corporations to never record the entropy they produce.

As long as money is created by debt and debt demands growth, the market will steer capital toward accelerated dissipation. Not because economic actors are evil, but because the price system sends them this signal, and they respond to it rationally.

Georgescu-Roegen wrote this fifty years ago. Economics chose to keep ignoring thermodynamics. The biosphere, however, does not ignore it. It settles its accounts on its own timeline — and its bill, unlike Payments for Ecosystem Services, is not capped.

Overhauling economics is not about greening it at the margins. It is about teaching it how to count entropy. It is about building a monetary system whose internal logic rewards negentropy instead of ignoring it. Inverting monetary polarity : transforming the insolvent essential into the profitable, and the profitable extractive into the costly.

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There is a precise moment in the life of any system of thought when it stops describing reality and begins fabricating it. Contemporary capitalism has reached that moment. Not in the din of a visible crisis, but in the insidious silence of an economy that invents its own problems in order to keep selling its solutions. That moment has a name: bullshitnovation.

This is not a metaphor. It is a mode of production.

I. The exhausted frontier: when capitalism turns against itself

Capitalist expansion has always needed an outside. A territory to conquer, a resource to extract, a need to satisfy. The Age of Discovery. The Industrial Revolution. Colonisation. Globalisation. At each stage, a new frontier opened and relaunched the machine.

But what happens when all frontiers are closed?

Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus that the absurd arises from the confrontation between humanity’s desire for meaning and the silence of the world. Applied to economics, the absurd emerges the moment the system can no longer justify its own existence through real results. It keeps moving forward, but towards what? It produces, but what exactly? It innovates, but to what end?

Hegel warned us: a system incapable of negating itself, incapable of producing its own contradiction, is a dead system that does not yet know it. The financialised capitalism of the 21st century resembles this walking dead. Markets break records, patents accumulate, startups are born by the thousands — and yet the fundamental question remains unanswered: what is any of this actually for?

The honest answer is vertiginous: to perpetuate itself.

II. The holy trinity and its infernal mechanics

Contemporary capitalism rests on three pillars that mutually legitimise each other in a perfect self-referential cycle: labour, finance, growth. Each justifies the other two. Growth requires labour. Labour demands finance. Finance only survives through growth. This trinity is closed upon itself, impervious to external critique — and therein lies its strength.

But it is also its confession of failure.

For this structure produces no meaning. It produces movement. A perpetual movement that must constantly justify itself — not by its effects on people or the planet, but by its own continuation. GDP growth is no longer a means — it is the end. Labour is no longer a human activity — it is a moral obligation.

The morality of toil

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” This biblical injunction did not disappear with the secularisation of Western societies. It simply changed temples. The office replaced the church, the manager took the priest’s place, and the payslip became the sacrament of a life well lived.

Nietzsche called “moraline” this tendency to disguise as a moral imperative what is in reality nothing more than a historical power relation. The glorification of toil is precisely this operation: transforming an economic necessity into a cardinal virtue, then into personal identity, until the person who does not work is not merely poor, but guilty.

This morality of toil is not trivial. It is the ideological cement without which the capitalist trinity collapses. If people ceased to believe that their value is measured by their productivity, the system would lose its primary mechanism of social control.

And when this moral injunction meets speculative finance, it becomes frankly toxic. For now it is no longer enough to work — one must work profitably. And profitability is not defined by the social utility of an activity, nor by its impact on living systems. It is defined by financial markets, at a quarterly horizon.

III. The manufacture of problems as a mode of production

This is where bullshitnovation intervenes — not as an anomaly, but as the logical response of an exhausted system.

There will always be people who praise capitalism. True, we live today in comfort and ease unimaginable two hundred years ago. But the heirs of contemporary capital demand the same returns as their forebears, without any new raw material to justify those returns. Future innovations will be incapable of generating as many jobs as the golden age of Fordism. Driven by automation, the work of engineers often amounts to maximising capital’s profits through the mass replacement of people by machines.

In laboratories and research centres, teams are ordered to find the next commercially viable novelty. If they fail, an entire belief system — founded on infinite innovation and the redemptive selfishness of the invisible hand — begins to wobble, and with it the financial bubble that depends on it.

Where innovation dies, bullshitnovation is born. A market only exists through the meeting of supply and demand. But what happens to supply when demand is absent? We have entered an era where supply forces demand by manipulating needs.

The mechanics are always the same, endlessly repeated: create false needs to hook our desires, create false fears to hook our affects. Murder the natural and free to sell the artificial and lucrative. Kill living, fertile soils to sell chemical fertilisers and Monsanto’s “frankenseeds”. Privatise the commons — water first, sold in plastic bottles after being extracted from collective aquifers. And perhaps one day, if they are left unchecked, they will do the same with the air we breathe. This is not an academic hypothesis: it is the logical trajectory of a system with no internal limit.

Always the same logic: create problems to sell solutions.

In healthcare, it takes the form of disease mongering — the industrial manufacture of pathologies. Baldness becomes emotional distress. Ordinary distraction becomes attention deficit disorder. Fluctuating libido becomes a sexual dysfunction to be treated. Let us also recall the Prozac scandal, whose market launch was based on the deliberate concealment of unfavourable studies and the invention of a new diagnostic paradigm tailored to fit the molecule. In every case, the schema is identical: transform a feature of the human condition into a clinical abnormality, then commercialise the correction. The drug does not arise from the disease — the disease is created for the drug.

In the world of work, it produces what anthropologist David Graeber documented as bullshit jobs — those positions whose holders secretly acknowledge to be pointless. Communications coordinators with nothing to coordinate, digital transformation consultants who transform nothing, lawyers specialising in the optimisation of tax optimisation. These jobs do not exist to produce value. They exist to keep alive the illusion of a functioning economy, and to reproduce wage dependency as a mechanism of social discipline.

In technology, it manifests as the proliferation of innovations with no real utility — connected gadgets solving problems no one had, productivity apps that consume the time they claim to free, objects with planned obsolescence designed to be discarded before they are worn out. Each smartphone replaced after two years by a near-identical model represents 240 kg of fossil fuels extracted, 22 kg of chemicals mobilised, 1.5 tonnes of water consumed. So that markets may continue to turn.

In geopolitics, finally, it takes its most violent form: the systematic inflation of threat. Let us recall Eisenhower’s 1961 speech, already warning of the growing grip of the military-industrial complex on democratic institutions. And Orwell, who understood as early as 1948 that the purpose of modern war is less victory than the permanent destruction of the productive surplus: business in war through armaments, business in peace through reconstruction — all of it fuel for the god GDP.

What unites all these mechanisms is a single logic: the problem is the raw material, fear is the engine, the market solution is the product.

IV. The planet as the only silent loser

In this grand theatre of economic absurdity, there is one actor that does not negotiate, does not communicate, does not vote. An actor whose alarm signals are systematically reinterpreted as market opportunities. That actor is the planet.

And it is the only one that is right.

The bullshitnovation machine is ontologically extractive. Not out of malice, but by structural necessity. Short-term profitability is the only language the system understands — and that language is fundamentally incompatible with the timescales of living systems.

Replanting a forest takes fifty years. Restoring depleted soil takes a generation. Reconstituting an over-exploited water table takes a century. None of these timescales fits in a quarterly report. None generates a return on investment legible by Bloomberg. So these activities are not financed — not because they are without value, but because debt-money, as it is constructed, is incapable of valuing them.

The degenerative is favoured because it is profitable. The regenerative is sidelined because it cannot generate short-term profits.

This is not a bias. It is an architecture.

Karl Polanyi understood this as early as 1944 in The Great Transformation: when the market becomes the sole regulator of social and natural life — when land, labour and money are treated as simple commodities — society ends up turning against itself in a desperate protective movement. Polanyi’s “double movement” is where we are. But these resistances, however necessary, are not enough. They attack symptoms without touching the engine.

V. The engine is money

This is what the critique of bullshitnovation reveals, if we push the reasoning to its conclusion.

The overproduction of useless things, the manufacture of pathologies, planned obsolescence, the privatisation of the commons, the war industry — all these phenomena converge on a single point of origin: the mode of monetary creation.

Contemporary money is created through debt. Every euro, every dollar that enters the economy is first a promise of repayment with interest. This mechanism imposes a logic of perpetual growth that is not an aberration of the system — it is its condition of survival. A monetary system founded on debt can only exist in expansion, because more must always be produced to repay the interest on what has already been created.

David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, showed that debt is not a neutral tool. It is a power relation. It creates a fundamental asymmetry between the one who issues and the one who owes. At the macroeconomic level, this asymmetry structures all productive choices: we finance what can repay the debt, we abandon what cannot.

That is to say: we finance the degenerative, we abandon the regenerative.

Bullshitnovation is therefore not primarily a problem of values, nor even a problem of regulation. It is a problem of monetary source code.

VI. What NEMO IMS proposes: restoring meaning to human labour

The NEMO IMS system — Negentropic Money International Monetary System — starts from a simple and radical hypothesis: what if money were created not by debt, but by regeneration?

In the current system, monetary creation is backed by promises of future production. In NEMO IMS, it is backed by the effective restoration of living systems — the reconstitution of natural commons, the regeneration of soils, forests, hydrological cycles, biodiversity.

This shift is not cosmetic. It is structural. It changes the answer to the fundamental question of any economy: what deserves to be financed?

In current capitalism, what deserves to be financed is what is profitable in the short term. In NEMO IMS, what deserves to be financed is what regenerates the conditions for life — at every timescale.

This change has a direct consequence for the question of labour. If money is no longer created through debt, if it no longer imposes growth as a condition of survival, then human labour can free itself from the injunction of extractive profitability. The farmer who restores a soil no longer needs to prove his efficiency to a shareholder. The forester replanting a mixed woodland is no longer a cost — he is at the origin of a monetary emission.

This is not the end of work. It is the end of necessarily degenerative work.

The morality of toil can be deconstructed not through a moral refusal of work, but through a redefinition of what work produces. No longer growth for its own sake, no longer the problem manufactured to sell the solution — but regeneration as the foundation of a living economy.

People can finally “leave each other in peace” regarding extractive productivity — not to do nothing, but to do things differently: useful, durable things, rooted in the timescales of living systems rather than the deadlines of financial investment.

Conclusion: The end of the absurd, or its perpetuation?

Camus proposed no exit from the absurd. He proposed looking it in the face and choosing to live anyway — to revolt rather than submit to the nihilistic evidence.

The economic absurdity described here calls for a similar revolt. Not the romantic revolt of those who say no without offering an alternative. But the constructive revolt of those who understand the mechanism and propose to rewire it.

Capitalism at the hour of its absurd no longer knows what to invent. It therefore invents diseases, wars, disposable objects, useless jobs, calibrated fears. It privatises water, patents life, creates money ex nihilo and calls it value creation.

The planet, meanwhile, keeps its accounts. Not in dollars. In degrees, in vanished species, in drained aquifers, in dead soils.

An alternative exists. It does not pass through morality — appeals to responsibility and virtue have changed nothing in fifty years. It passes through architecture. Through the reconstruction of the economy’s source code: money.

To change the way money is created is to change what the economy considers value. It is to change what people do with their lives. It is to make possible what is today structurally forbidden: an economy that regenerates rather than exhausts.

That is NEMO IMS.

Jean-Christophe Duval

You lose your lives earning your survival, while others enjoy theirs at the expense of life itself.

This is not a law of physics. It is not a natural order carved in the rock of centuries. Money is a social creation — something invented by people, shaped by contexts, beliefs, ideologies, and above all, interests. And like all human creations, it can be reinvented. But first, it must be understood. And that is precisely what has been denied to you.

Debt: the most sophisticated form of servitude

The slave of old wore visible chains. The master had to feed, watch, and coerce. It was costly. Inefficient. Too visible.

Debt is perfected slavery.

The master no longer tires himself whipping the slave. The slave whips himself. And the greater the debt, the heavier the chain.

He works. Repays. Goes into debt again to survive. Exhausts himself. Ages. Then passes the chain to his children — and calls it an “inheritance”.

If the master knows he is the master, the slave does not know he is a slave. The system holds as long as this remains so.

This system is not the result of chance. It is the product of a meticulously constructed architecture, layer upon layer, decade after decade, by those who took the time to shape its workings.

What you don’t know: money is born from a ledger entry

The misunderstanding of the monetary question often stems from assimilating money to gold or precious metal. We culturally trust money because we know that gold cannot be created, duplicated, or destroyed. But where the alchemists of old failed to turn lead into gold, bankers have succeeded in creating money from nothing.

Magic? No — once you understand that money is no longer bound by the immutable laws of physics, but by a set of social conventions and a game of accounting rules.

Money is created by the banker’s pen and destroyed by his eraser.

Perhaps you believe that banks lend out their depositors’ money? That money is a scarce resource that must be found somewhere before it can be distributed?

That is false. And this idea is not trivial: it lies at the foundation of your servitude. Aldous Huxley put it well: the most enduring servitude is one that succeeds in making slaves believe they are free.

The reality is both simpler and more dizzying: when a bank grants you credit, it creates money from nothing. It records a claim on its assets, credits your account on its liabilities — and there, money exists where there was none before.

Magic? No... just accounting.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented, recognised and explained operation of central banks themselves.

“Loans make deposits.” This formula by the economist Hartley Withers sums up in a few words what has been concealed from you for decades: money is not found. It is manufactured.

By decision. By writing. And above all: by private interests.

But if banks have the privilege of creating money through credit, they also have the obligation to destroy it upon repayment. When you repay a loan, that money is destroyed. It disappears from balance sheets — this is the law of reflux.

Modern money is therefore a temporary creation, born of debt, condemned to die with debt repayment. Everything else follows from this.

The great dismantling: when the state surrendered its monetary sovereignty

There was a time — not so long ago — when the French state did not depend on financial markets to finance its projects.

A time when post-war reconstruction, major public infrastructure, national education, and hospitals were not conditional on the approval of foreign pension funds. That time was called the Treasury circuit. Born in the urgency of the 1940s, this system allowed the state to collect national savings and redirect them toward the public interest without submitting to the permanent constraint of the markets.

Commercial banks were required to hold a share of their deposits in Treasury bonds. The Banque de France granted direct advances at preferential rates. It was public investment that guided the private sector, not the reverse.

It was not perfect. It was administered. But it was sovereign.

Then, methodically, this system was dismantled. Not through a brutal rupture — brutal ruptures make noise — but through a succession of technical reforms, regulatory unravellings, and quiet adjustments.

Maastricht, or servitude constitutionalised

The real turning point, the one that poured concrete around the chains, was the Maastricht Treaty.

Its Article 104 — now Article 123 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union — prohibits the ECB and national central banks from directly granting credit to states or purchasing their bonds on the primary market.

In plain terms: eurozone states can no longer create their own money. They must borrow it on financial markets — from the same private banks that create that money ex nihilo.

The result: billions of euros in interest are extracted each year from collective labour to remunerate capital holders, the great bondholders. Billions that finance neither hospitals, nor schools, nor ecological transition. Billions that serve to maintain a monetary architecture structurally dependent on debt.

Sovereign debt is so high precisely because it is a profitable business. And debt is not unrelated to ecological destruction: a debt is a promise of future extraction. The higher it is, the more it compels us toward endless extraction. We are therefore slaves condemned to destroy the planet.

The left also put on the handcuffs

It would be too comfortable to frame this as a simple opposition between right and left.

In the 1980s, under Pierre Bérégovoy, France accelerated its financial deregulation to attract international capital. Markets gradually became the supreme arbiters of economic efficiency. Public debt was restructured to meet the expectations of global investors. Private banks became central intermediaries in state financing.

This was probably not a conscious betrayal.

It was a belief — neoliberalism. The belief that markets were more rational than democracy. We are living today with the consequences of that belief.

What this architecture forbids you to think

Public debt, as it is presented today, is not merely an economic figure — it is a political instrument for controlling the possible.

When every democratic debate reduces to “How do we repay?”, it becomes impossible to ask:

• How do we want to live?

• How do we want to care for one another?

• How do we want to inhabit the world?

• How do we want to navigate the ecological crisis without further destroying the living world?

Austerity is not a physical necessity — it is a political choice disguised as an accounting constraint. And this disguise is maintained daily by ratings agencies, certain commentators, dominant economic models, and institutions that repeat that “there is no alternative”.

There is always an alternative. The real question is: who has an interest in ensuring you never imagine it?

Toward another architecture: money as a tool of the living

If monetary history demonstrates anything clearly, it is that monetary systems are not natural laws — they are human constructions.

The Treasury circuit existed and was dismantled. The current system exists and can — must — be changed.

But the problem is not only “Who creates money?” It is also “Why is it created?” and “Under what conditions?” Today, money is born primarily from debt and mechanically drives more growth, more extraction, more destruction of ecological balances.

The NEMO IMS system proposes a radical inversion of this logic: money — part of it — would no longer be created in exchange for debt and extraction, but in exchange for the regeneration of living systems.

These monetary creations would correspond to real improvements in ecological and social robustness: regenerated soils, restored forests, protected wetlands, resilient infrastructure, strengthened commons, sanctuarised biodiversity.

Money would then become a tool of systemic robustness rather than an engine of economic entropy.

What to do now?

Understanding is already an act of resistance. Not because understanding is enough — it never is. But because ignorance is the first pillar of consent.

They master the workings of money. You can master them too. Not to become like them, but to build something else.

Étienne de La Boétie wrote in the sixteenth century that voluntary servitude is not fate: it is a habit sustained by fear, comfort and ignorance. The modern tyrant no longer necessarily has a face — he has an interest rate, a treaty, an accounting convention, a line on a balance sheet.

But he is no more eternal than the feudalism, mercantilism or legal slavery that preceded him. Monetary history is a history of ruptures.

We are probably at the moment of choosing a new one

Find out other articles from Debunk’Onomy

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You are the last human being on Earth. Around you: vaults filled with gold bars, ten-figure stock portfolios, ultra-rare NFTs stored on servers still humming away. By every criterion our civilisation has patiently constructed over three centuries, you are the richest person in history.

But if debt is a promise of future extraction, your fortune is the proof of past extraction. The soils are dead, the rivers are dry, the pollinators have disappeared, the food chain has collapsed in silence while markets were breaking records. How much is your gold worth now?

This is not an apocalyptic metaphor designed to frighten — it is a logical test. And it reveals something fundamental that our economic system stubbornly refuses to integrate: we have inverted the hierarchy of values.

We destroy “tomorrow” in the name of “today” in an exuberant quest for immediate gratification. We glorify gold — a clichéd symbol, yet still current — without understanding that what underpins its value lies in the good health of the world around it.

Gold or life: a question that should never have had to be asked

The maxim is simple, almost obvious once stated: a planet in good ecological health will always feed humanity, even in poverty. A ruined planet will feed no one, no matter how rich.

Being a billionaire in a ruined world is beside the point.

And yet our entire economic architecture operates against this evidence. For a simple reason: we have not yet grasped the impossibility of decoupling, and economists have still not integrated ecological and social costs into their reasoning.

Our money is created through debt — that is, through the promise of future extraction. To repay, one must produce. To produce, one must extract. To extract, one must destroy. The system has no neutral gear. It only moves forward. And forward is the wall.

Meanwhile, what actually keeps us alive — soil fertility, air quality, climate stability, functional biodiversity — has no value in our accounts.

Tragically, what cannot be counted does not count.

These goods have no price because they have no owner. And what has no owner does not exist in the grammar of the market.

This is what I call the inversion of value: the ethical displacement by which a civilisation comes to despise what keeps it alive and to sacralise what destroys it.

The bug is in our heads — but it has an explanation

Why are we so stubbornly incapable of correcting this trajectory? The answer does not lie in our collective malevolence. It lies in our neurobiology.

Neuroscientist Sébastien Bohler, in The Human Bug, documented this with precision: at the centre of our brain sits the striatum, an archaic structure inherited from our vertebrate ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago. The striatum manages the reward circuit. It releases dopamine. And it was selected by evolution in a context of permanent scarcity.

In that world of scarcity, five behaviours were rewarded: accumulating food, multiplying partners, climbing the social hierarchy, conserving effort, and consuming new information. These five instincts ensured the species’ survival for hundreds of thousands of years.

The problem? The striatum has no satiety mechanism. It does not know how to stop. And its dopaminergic neurons do not activate in response to what was expected — only to what exceeds expectations. To keep feeling pleasure, the human brain demands an ever-increasing dose of stimulation.

Transpose this mechanism into a world of industrial abundance and you get: fast fashion, recommendation algorithms, mass pornography, overeating, and the financialisation of everything. Capitalism has plugged our archaic striatum into an infinite stimulation machine. Produce, consume, obtain gratification, recognition, seduction.

If our brain allowed us to win the lottery of evolution, this very same mental software is today driving us to ravage the biosphere for dopamine hits.

The physical reality of the plunder

The physical reality of this plunder is rarely made visible. Let the figures speak.

A pair of jeans. 7,500 litres of water to manufacture. Cotton cultivation, representing just 3% of global agricultural land, absorbs 16% of all insecticides used on the planet. A garment you may wear ten times before discarding.

A smartphone. 200 grams in your pocket. 44 kilograms of raw materials extracted, refined, transported — rare earths, cobalt, lithium torn from conflict zones or ecological disasters. More than 80% of its total carbon footprint is already consumed before you switch it on for the first time.

Global agro-industry. It has tripled its output since 1970. And it has destroyed one third of the planet’s forest cover to do so. The resulting loss of soil fertility is estimated at 10% of global annual GDP — a cost no one pays, no one records, and that nature absorbs in silence until the moment it no longer can.

Economic growth resembles a building onto which ever more floors are added without understanding that each new floor requires removing bricks from the foundations. While construction rises, shareholders applaud. So far so good… until the day everything collapses.

Our only chance: deprogramme our gratification logic in relation to value.

Are we condemned by our own brain?

No. And Darwin himself gives us the key, in a book few have read: The Descent of Man (1871).

Darwin demonstrates there that natural selection did not only favour claws and teeth. It selected social instincts — sympathy, altruism, group cohesion — because collective survival outweighed individual survival against the forces of nature.

The anthropologist Patrick Tort theorises this shift under the name of the reversive effect of evolution. Natural selection, by selecting social instincts, ends up selecting civilisation — that is, a system of values that frontally opposes raw eliminatory selection. Civilisation protects the weak. It cares. It builds laws. It sets limits.

Tort’s metaphor is that of the Möbius strip: culture is the continuous extension of nature which, at a certain point in its development, turns back on itself to present an autonomous face, governed by different rules. We are at that point.

And Tort introduces another crucial concept borrowed from biology: hypertely. In biology, a hypertelic organ is one that has developed beyond its adaptive usefulness to the point of threatening the survival of the species — like the giant antlers of the megaloceros, which prevented it from fleeing through forests.

Our material growth is hypertelic. It has exceeded its utility. It has become a danger to the very species that produced it. The intelligence of limits means knowing how to recognise hypertely before it kills you.

Merit in reverse

Our system also has a moral problem. We have built a civilisation on an ethic of productivist merit: dignity is earned through transformative and extractive effort. “You will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow.” Those who produce deserve. Those who abstain are lazy.

The result: the person who clears a forest to sell timber is celebrated for their economic dynamism. The person who restores a soil or cleans up a river volunteers their time, because the market does not know how to pay for repair.

The Covid crisis briefly made this aberration visible. Society continued to function without most of the highly paid bullshit jobs. It proved dependent on those whom the market despised most: nurses, refuse workers, agricultural labourers.

The inversion of value demands reinventing merit — no longer measured by what is extracted, but by what is regenerated. No longer by performance, but by robustness. No longer by individualist maximisation, but by collective resilience.

Re-educating the striatum?

Here is the good news that neuroscience offers: the reward circuit can be redirected.

Brain imaging studies show that self-giving, sharing, and mutual support activate the same dopaminergic reward circuits as the accumulation of wealth. Altruism produces pleasure — biologically, not metaphorically.

Sébastien Bohler identifies the anterior cingulate cortex as a key lever. This brain region detects inconsistencies between our beliefs and reality. When the gap becomes unbearable — as with the imminence of ecological collapse — it triggers a quest for meaning, a cognitive reorganisation.

Making social status a vector of sobriety rather than ostentation. Our striatum seeks recognition — if the cultural norm valorises sobriety and stigmatises ostentatious accumulation, the striatum will work in the right direction.

Redirecting accumulation toward the intangible: knowledge, arts, relationships, skills — forms of wealth that satisfy our need for novelty without consuming physical resources.

Practising sensory slowdown: savouring a single grape slowly activates the reward circuit more intensely than gulping a whole bowl without attention. Less matter, more pleasure. The striatum can be fooled.

In other words, Homo œconomicus will have to learn to be attractive without a large car.

What NEMO IMS changes in the equation

The underlying thesis here is monetary. As long as money is created through debt — that is, through the obligation of future extraction — no philosophy of value can genuinely shape economic behaviour. You may wish to regenerate soils, but if your financial survival depends on a system that requires you to extract in order to repay, goodwill remains a posture.

The NEMO IMS system starts from a different premise: anchoring money creation in the regeneration of living systems rather than in debt. Money is no longer the counterpart of a promise of extraction — it becomes the counterpart of an act of restoration of biological commons.

This is not poetry. It is a mechanism. When the rules of the game change, behaviour changes. When regenerating becomes more profitable than extracting, the striatum follows.

The inversion of value is not merely philosophical. It must be institutionally encoded in the monetary architecture. Otherwise, it remains a wish.

Homo Philosophicus

Gold is a relic of extractivist archaism. A rare metal, fetishised for centuries, symbol of a wealth that cannot be eaten, cannot breathe, and does not grow.

A living planet, by contrast, feeds. It hydrates. It regulates. It repairs. And it does so without needing a bank account.

True civilisation — in Patrick Tort’s sense, as the rational culmination of evolution — is that which has the intelligence of its own limits. That which knows how to recognise hypertely before it becomes lethal. That which substitutes predatory competition with cooperation for the preservation of planetary commons.

Homo œconomicus — overproducing to succeed and overconsuming to show others he has succeeded — is a model of life we must shed.

This shift is not ascetic. It is not punitive. It is logical.

We have the brain to achieve it. We have the institutions to reinvent. We have the monetary tools to refound. What remains is to stop dying for gold in a burning world — and to start living for what lives.

Homo Oeconomicus has had his time. Welcome, Homo Philosophicus.

Jean-Christophe Duval

Microeconomics, macroeconomics, macro-systemic thinking. Three ways of looking at the economy. Three levels of perspective. And yet one of them is almost entirely absent from the way we typically think about economic reality. Let us start with a metaphor.

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The chessboard metaphor

Microeconomics: you are a piece on the chessboard and you see everything from your own point of view, according to the rules of the game.

Debunk'Onomy

Each piece on the board has a role, a value, a range of movement. The queen moves freely in all directions — representing multinationals, powerful and agile. The knight leaps unexpectedly: investment funds, disruptive startups. The bishop glides diagonally: specialised industries, innovative entrepreneurs. The rooks are established companies with mature markets. And then there are the pawns — households, workers, small businesses. Indispensable to the game. Often sacrificed in the system’s logic.

You see the world from the piece you are. You are inside the game. Microeconomics models economic agents from within — their assumed rationalities, their strategies, their responses to signals. It looks through the narrow end of the telescope. And it does so very well.

Stepping outside the chessboard

Macroeconomics consists of stepping outside the chessboard to observe it from a higher vantage point. Global equilibria. Rules of operation. System-wide dynamics.

Interest rates. Money creation. Fiscal policies. International trade. Inflation. Growth. Unemployment. The game seen as a system.

Macroeconomics tries to organise the pieces’ movements to prevent immediate chaos on the board. It monitors imbalances — an inflationary pressure here, a bubble forming there. It is indispensable. And yet, even at this height, something essential remains invisible.

Step back further — see the table

Step back further, until you can see the table. The table on which everything rests: the board, the pieces, the clock, the two glasses, the bottle of brandy. The foundation that nobody talks about because nobody, inside the game, has any reason to look at it — and that we have never factored into our way of thinking about the economy.

This is what I call macro-systemic thinking: reasoning at the foundational level. The level of the conditions that make the very existence of the economic system possible. The whole game rests on the assumption that this table is eternal — that it has no limits, no fragility, no collapse threshold, that it will always supply the pieces with the resources they need to grow.

So the pieces, deprived of guardrails, gnaw at it continuously. Not out of malice, but out of logic. To grow, to exist, to follow the rules of the board — they draw from the table itself. They consume its substance. And the board does not measure this. It has no indicator for it. It even rewards the pieces that devour the table fastest. We call this “performance”.

What is this table, exactly?

Concretely, the table is the set of conditions that economics generally takes for granted: a stable climate, functioning oceans, fertile soils, fresh water, accessible energy, ecosystems that regulate and regenerate, biodiversity — millions of invisible interactions maintaining the balance of the living world.

But also: social trust, minimal geopolitical stability, functioning institutions, logistics networks that hold, public health as collective capacity.

In short: everything without which the chessboard does not exist. These elements generally have no market price. They do not appear in balance sheets. They do not count in GDP — except when destroyed. And that is precisely where the system’s perversity lies: “what cannot be counted does not count.”

The rules reward those who devour the table fastest

The dominant economy measures market flows. It measures activity. It does not measure — or barely measures — systemic sustainability. A destroyed forest increases GDP. So does an oil spill. So does a war. So does a climate disaster.

Why? Because the board counts the activity generated by repairs and reconstructions, without ever integrating the destruction of the underlying ecological, social or civilisational capital. It records the gnawing of the table as performance. It rewards it.

A piece that destroys a forest is a piece that advances. A piece that restores an ecosystem without monetising it is a piece that stagnates, or even regresses.

The question economics dares not ask

The rules we have created in this unconsciousness make us confuse performance with robustness. We measure the growth of the pieces without ever understanding that it rests on the degradation of the table.

Macro-systemic thinking shifts the fundamental question. It no longer asks only: “How do we produce more?” It asks: “What are the conditions that allow the system to continue to exist?”

A civilisation can survive a recession, a financial crash, even a prolonged depression. The pieces fall, the board reorganises, the game resumes. But a civilisation does not survive the collapse of the table itself. The collapse of soil fertility, the destabilisation of hydrological cycles, the rupture of global logistics chains — these have no recovery plan. No central bank rate resolves them.

The true wealth of a society lies in its capacity to preserve the table itself.

NEMO IMS: a monetary system that changes the rules of the game

Money is a system of signals. It orients behaviours, investments, production decisions. It determines, ultimately, what “is worth something” and what has no price.

In the current monetary system, money is created primarily through debt. Every euro or dollar in circulation corresponds to a repayment promise — with interest. This mechanism imposes an inescapable logic: you must grow to repay. Produce more. Extract more. Sell more — and destroy the “table.”

The current monetary system does not ask pieces to preserve the table. It economically forbids them from stopping. To stop is to fail to repay. To fail to repay is to disappear. The gnawing is not a deviance. It is an architectural obligation.

If the problem is architectural, the response must be too. This is why I propose NEMO IMS (Negentropic Money International Monetary System).

The founding idea is simple to formulate, even if its implementation is complex: if money is a signal, let us make it send signals aligned with the health of the “table.”

In the current system, money creation is backed by debt and economic growth. In NEMO IMS, it is conditioned on the regeneration of living systems. Money is no longer created against a promise of future growth, but against concrete proof of restoration — of ecosystems, soils, commons, planetary equilibria.

NEMO IMS articulates several complementary mechanisms: an exchange standard based on planetary boundaries — the nine Earth system boundaries identified by Johan Rockström and colleagues; a negentropic money creation mechanism anchored in verifiable acts of ecological regeneration; and an international governance body — the GAIA Economic Symposium — overseeing the balance between monetary emission, ecological regeneration, and distributive justice.

What NEMO IMS seeks to achieve: align monetary logic with macro-systemic logic. Make the money-signal stop rewarding gnawing — and start valuing what economics has never known how to count: taking care of what makes everything exist and still have meaning. The table.

jean-Christophe Duval

Le blocage du détroit d’Ormuz, la ruée sur les métaux critiques, le bras de fer Trump-Xi à Pékin — les médias les lisent comme des événements séparés. Ils sont les symptômes d’un seul et même mal : un système monétaire conçu pour un monde sans limites, qui vient de percuter les bords d’une planète finie.

Il est temps de poser la seule question qui vaille : comment changer de moteur ?

I — L’aporie monétaire : On ne débloque pas un détroit avec des taux d’intérêt

Depuis le 28 février 2026, le détroit d’Ormuz est paralysé. La réponse de la Banque Centrale Européenne ? Maintenir ses taux directeurs à 3,5 % pour « contenir l’inflation ». C’est le degré zéro de la pensée systémique.

La politique monétaire conventionnelle est structurellement incapable de répondre à un choc d’offre exogène. En renchérissant le crédit, elle freine la demande et l’investissement sans produire une seule molécule de pétrole supplémentaire. La BCE tente de soigner une hémorragie physique avec des pansements comptables.

Le système monétaire-dette exige une croissance de la production pour honorer l’intérêt, alors même que l’énergie nécessaire à cette production devient physiquement inaccessible.

II — Le mirage des métaux : La délocalisation de l’extractivisme

Le 5 mai, le plan « métaux critiques » de Roland Lescure a été présenté comme le summum de la souveraineté. En réalité, ce n’est qu’une mise à jour logicielle de l’extractivisme. Pour sécuriser le lithium, le cobalt et les terres rares nécessaires à la « transition », l’Europe ne fait que déplacer sa prédation vers les sous-sols du Congo, du Chili ou d’Indonésie.

Le verrou est ici conceptuel : notre monnaie, née de la dette, ne sait valoriser que le flux — de matières, de marchandises, de déchets. Elle est incapable de récompenser la sobriété ou le « ne pas extraire ». Ce plan souverain n’est pas une transition énergétique, c’est une sécurisation des inputs pour permettre au moteur entropique de continuer à tourner, quoi qu’il en coûte à la biosphère.

III — Pékin : Deux empires pour un gâteau qui rétrécit

Le sommet Trump-Xi de cette semaine à Pékin illustre la fin de l’abondance. Washington et Pékin ne s’affrontent pas sur le modèle de société, mais sur l’occupation du siège conducteur d’un véhicule dont le réservoir est vide.

Tous deux partagent le même logiciel : une économie financée par la création monétaire ex nihilo, orientée vers la croissance du PIB et dépendante de l’expansion géographique. Alors que le FMI révise ses prévisions à la baisse en raison du conflit en Iran, les deux puissances négocient des trêves superficielles sur les droits de douane pour masquer une réalité brutale : dans un monde saturé, la croissance de l’un se fait désormais mécaniquement au détriment de l’autre.

Le Diagnostic — Les trois malédictions de la monnaie-dette

→ L’extraction mécanique : Chaque euro de dette est une promesse d’extraction future pour rembourser le principal et l’intérêt. La Terre est le payeur en premier ressort.

→ La validation sélective : Le système ne finance que ce qui est « bancable » (extraction, flux rapides). La régénération est traitée comme une perte sèche.

→ Le nœud gordien : Nous détruisons le capital naturel pour honorer le capital financier.

La proposition NEMO IMS — Inverser la polarité

◆ Désencastrer la monnaie de la dette : La création monétaire est adossée à la régénération mesurable des communs (reforestation, dépollution, restauration des sols).

◆ La Finance Yin/Yang : Un pilier dédié aux marchés (Yang) et un pilier dédié à la préservation planétaire (Yin), alimenté par des NEMO Green DTS émis sans dette.

◆ La Fonte Monétaire : Une monnaie qui s’use (taux de fonte) si elle sert à des activités entropiques, incitant structurellement à la conservation plutôt qu’à la dissipation.

Conclusion — L’heure n’est plus aux ajustements à la marge

Ces trois mécanismes — extraction obligatoire, validation sélective, destruction du vivant au profit du financier — ne sont pas des bugs. Ce sont les features d’un système monétaire thermodynamiquement incompatible avec un monde fini.

Le NEMO IMS ne propose pas de mieux gérer ce système. Il propose de changer ce que la monnaie récompense : non plus la destruction pour la croissance, mais la régénération pour l’équilibre. Ce n’est pas une utopie. C’est une nécessité arithmétique.

Si une banque centrale ne peut pas débloquer un détroit, stabiliser un climat ou régénérer une forêt — à quoi sert-elle vraiment ?

Debunk’Onomy · Think & Move to Degrowth · debunkonomy.org

Ce secret, c’est la création monétaire.

L’argent que nous utilisons chaque jour — pour acheter notre pain, payer notre loyer, investir dans une entreprise — n’est pas créé par les gouvernements. Il n’est pas imprimé par les banques centrales en fonction des besoins de l’économie. Il naît d’un acte comptable réalisé par des banques commerciales privées lorsqu’elles accordent un crédit.

Et cet argent porte une tare originelle : il est né d’une dette. Pour qu’il existe, quelqu’un doit s’endetter. Et pour que cette dette soit remboursée avec intérêts, il faut que d’autres s’endettent encore plus.

Ce n’est pas un dysfonctionnement. C’est la logique même du système.

La création monétaire ex nihilo : L’argent sort du néant

Le sens commun imagine encore que les banques prêtent l’argent que les épargnants ont déposé. C’est faux. La réalité est exactement inverse : ce sont les crédits qui font les dépôts, et non l’inverse.

Lorsqu’un ménage, une entreprise ou un État sollicite un crédit auprès d’une banque, celle-ci ne va pas vérifier ses coffres pour s’assurer qu’elle dispose de fonds disponibles. Elle procède à une opération comptable en partie double.

Au bilan de la banque, le prêt est inscrit à l’actif (une créance sur le client). Simultanément, elle inscrit au passif, sur le compte de dépôt du client, la somme correspondante.

À cet instant précis, de la nouvelle monnaie est créée. Elle n’existait pas la seconde précédente. C’est ce qu’on appelle la création ex nihilo — à partir de rien.

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La loi du reflux : L’argent qui disparaît

Cette monnaie créée n’est pas permanente. Elle est destinée à disparaître lorsque le crédit est remboursé. Quand le client rembourse le principal de sa dette, l’écriture comptable s’annule : l’actif et le passif de la banque diminuent symétriquement, et la masse monétaire globale se contracte.

C’est ce que les économistes appellent la loi du reflux : la monnaie bancaire est temporaire, elle circule puis retourne à sa source pour être détruite.

Mais ce processus de création et de destruction n’est pas symétrique. Il est grevé par un élément qui change tout : l’intérêt.

La métaphore des trous : Visualiser l’impasse

Pour comprendre pourquoi le système est condamné à une expansion perpétuelle de la dette, imaginons une métaphore visuelle.

Représentons-nous un sol plat. Ce sol représente le zéro comptable, l’équilibre absolu. Aucune monnaie, aucune dette.

Pour créer de la monnaie, une banque commence par creuser un trou dans ce sol. La profondeur du trou correspond à la dette contractée. La terre qui sort de ce trou est empilée à côté : elle représente la monnaie, le flux de liquidités injecté dans l’économie.

L’emprunteur dispose maintenant de “pelletées de terre” (de l’argent) pour payer ses salariés, acheter des machines, ou consommer. Ces salariés reçoivent cette terre et peuvent s’en servir pour deux choses : soit combler leurs propres trous (rembourser leurs dettes), soit accumuler des montagnes (épargner).

Mais voici le drame structurel du système : pour que les anciens trous soient comblés, il faut impérativement que d’autres agents acceptent de creuser des trous encore plus profonds pour générer la terre nécessaire à la circulation.

Dans une économie monétaire de production, la monnaie est le résidu de l’endettement. Il ne peut y avoir de “piles de terre” circulant pour faciliter les échanges si personne n’accepte de porter le poids du “vide” — le trou — dans son propre bilan.

L’impossibilité mathématique du désendettement global

La métaphore révèle une vérité brutale, mais on peut aller plus loin en analysant la mécanique exacte de l’impasse.

Le paradoxe des profits monétaires

Imaginons une économie simplifiée. Les entreprises empruntent 100 unités monétaires pour payer des salaires. Elles distribuent donc 100 unités de revenus aux ménages.

Mais si les entreprises veulent réaliser un profit de 20 unités, elles doivent vendre leur production pour 120 unités. Or, les ménages ne possèdent que les 100 unités initialement reçues.

Il manque structurellement 20 unités de monnaie dans le circuit pour valider le profit espéré par les entrepreneurs.

Pour que ce profit se matérialise sous forme monétaire, il faut une injection de monnaie supplémentaire qui ne provienne pas du coût de production initial. La solution classique ? Que les entreprises, les ménages ou l’État contractent de nouveaux crédits.

Ainsi, le profit monétaire des uns est littéralement financé par l’endettement nouveau des autres. Sans cette expansion continue de la masse monétaire par la dette, le système entrerait en crise.

La malédiction des intérêts

La métaphore des trous introduit ici un élément aggravant : les “poignées de terre” prélevées par les banques à chaque transaction sous forme d’intérêts.

Lorsqu’une banque prête 100 unités, elle crée 100 unités de monnaie. Mais elle exige le remboursement de 105 unités (100 de principal + 5 d’intérêts).

Les 5 unités supplémentaires nécessaires pour couvrir l’intérêt n’ont jamais été créées par l’opération initiale.

Pour que l’ensemble des débiteurs puisse rembourser le principal ET les intérêts, il faut que la masse monétaire totale augmente plus vite que les remboursements. Cela implique une spirale d’endettement : on ne peut rembourser les intérêts de la dette passée qu’en créant une dette future encore plus massive.

C’est un mythe de Sisyphe financier. Chaque effort de remboursement nécessite de creuser un trou plus grand pour maintenir la terre en circulation.

Le remboursement comme destruction de monnaie

Le remboursement du principal à une banque détruit la monnaie. Contrairement à une dépense de consommation qui transfère la monnaie d’un agent à un autre, le remboursement fait disparaître la monnaie du circuit économique.

Dans une économie en croissance, les entreprises accumulent des dettes de long terme pour financer leurs investissements. Chaque année, elles doivent consacrer une part de leurs recettes au remboursement de ces crédits anciens. Cette ponction réduit le montant de monnaie disponible pour acheter la production courante.

Pour éviter la récession, le flux de nouveaux crédits doit impérativement être supérieur au flux de remboursements. Le système est condamné à une accélération perpétuelle de l’endettement pour simplement compenser l’effet dépressif de la destruction monétaire.

La dette globale ne peut pas être remboursée.

Ce n’est pas une question de mauvaise gestion ou de manque de volonté politique. C’est une impossibilité mathématique inscrite dans la structure même de la création monétaire. Rembourser toutes les dettes signifierait détruire toute la monnaie. L’économie s’effondrerait instantanément.

La dette comme promesse d’extraction du vivant

Le lien entre cette mécanique monétaire et la crise écologique est peut-être l’aspect le plus sombre et le moins discuté de l’économie contemporaine.

La dette n’est pas seulement une créance sur des revenus monétaires futurs. Elle est, en dernière analyse, une créance sur le vivant.

L’obligation de rentabilité extractive

Puisque la monnaie naît avec la dette, chaque unité monétaire en circulation impose une contrainte de rentabilité à celui qui la détient ou qui doit la rembourser.

Pour solder un crédit de 100 avec 5 % d’intérêts, il ne suffit pas de faire circuler la monnaie existante. Il faut générer une valeur ajoutée marchande supérieure à celle initialement empruntée.

Dans notre système biophysique, la création de valeur marchande repose presque exclusivement sur la transformation de ressources naturelles en marchandises : énergie fossile, minerais, biomasse, eau, sols.

Plus les dettes se creusent, plus la pression sur les écosystèmes s’intensifie. Nous nous obligeons à creuser des trous de plus en plus profonds dans la nature pour combler des trous de plus en plus gros sur nos feuilles de comptabilité !

Chaque euro de dette supplémentaire est une promesse mathématique d’extraire plus de pétrole demain, d’abattre plus de forêts, de pomper plus d’eau, de rejeter plus de CO₂.

L’impossibilité du découplage entre croissance économique et impact environnemental découle directement de cette structure monétaire. On ne peut pas rembourser une dette croissante dans une économie stationnaire ou en décroissance.

Le paradoxe fiscal de la réparation

Un obstacle supplémentaire apparaît lorsqu’on analyse le financement des politiques publiques.

Actuellement, l’État finance les services publics et la réparation des dommages écologiques par l’impôt prélevé sur les activités marchandes. Or, ces activités marchandes sont majoritairement polluantes ou extractives — car ce sont les plus rentables et les plus capables de supporter le coût du crédit bancaire.

Si la société réduit sa consommation matérielle pour protéger la planète, elle réduit mécaniquement l’assiette fiscale. Pour maintenir le même niveau de recettes publiques (nécessaires pour réparer les dégâts climatiques), l’État serait contraint d’encourager une reprise de la production marchande ailleurs.

C’est le cercle vicieux : il faut détruire pour gagner les moyens de réparer.

Les limites du système : Vers la finance pathologique

L’accumulation perpétuelle de dettes finit par heurter deux limites fondamentales : la limite de solvabilité des agents et le plancher des taux d’intérêt.

Le plancher du taux zéro

Pour maintenir la soutenabilité d’une dette qui ne cesse de croître, les banques centrales ont réduit les taux d’intérêt de manière continue depuis quarante ans. En baissant le coût du loyer de l’argent, on permet aux agents de porter un volume de dette plus important avec le même revenu.

Mais cette politique a atteint ses limites avec l’arrivée au “plancher des taux nuls” et même, dans certains pays, l’apparition de taux négatifs.

L’apparition de taux d’intérêt négatifs est le signe d’une pathologie profonde. Dans ce scénario, le créancier accepte de payer pour prêter, ce qui renverse la logique même du capitalisme. C’est le symptôme d’une économie saturée de dettes que plus personne ne peut rembourser sans une injection massive et continue de liquidités.

La spirale déflationniste

Si le flux de nouveaux crédits vient à se tarir — par exemple si les banques deviennent frileuses ou si les agents refusent de s’endetter davantage —, le mécanisme de destruction monétaire l’emporte sur la création. La masse monétaire se contracte, provoquant une baisse de la demande et des prix.

À mesure que les prix baissent, la valeur réelle de la dette augmente. Bien que l’agent rembourse nominalement ses crédits, il s’appauvrit plus vite car ses revenus chutent plus radicalement que sa dette ne diminue.

Cette instabilité intrinsèque prouve que le système est incapable de s’autoréguler. Sans une intervention extérieure massive pour injecter de la monnaie sans contrepartie de dette, l’économie s’effondre sous le poids de son propre vide comptable.

Une autre voie est-elle possible ?

Face à ce diagnostic, la question devient : peut-on imaginer un système monétaire qui ne repose pas sur l’endettement perpétuel ?

La réponse est oui. Mais cela exige de briser le lien organique entre création monétaire et dette privée.

Désencastrer la monnaie de la dette

Plutôt que de laisser aux banques privées le monopole de l’émission monétaire via le crédit, on pourrait imaginer que des institutions publiques créent de la monnaie sans dette pour financer des activités régénératives : dépollution, reforestation, restauration des sols, recherche fondamentale, services publics de santé et d’éducation.

Cette monnaie ne serait pas un prêt à rembourser, mais un don de la société envers elle-même pour assurer sa propre survie. Elle permettrait de sortir de la logique extractive en créant le flux monétaire nécessaire au fonctionnement de l’économie sans exiger une croissance infinie de la dette.

La régulation par la fonte monétaire

Pour éviter l’inflation et assurer la stabilité, cette monnaie pourrait être régulée par un mécanisme de “fonte” progressive lors des transactions marchandes — une sorte de TVA écologique intelligente qui appliquerait une destruction monétaire plus élevée sur les produits issus d’activités extractives ou polluantes.

Ainsi, la monnaie cesserait d’être un instrument de domination pour devenir un flux régulateur qui favorise structurellement la régénération plutôt que la destruction.

Conclusion : Sortir du piège de Sisyphe

L’analyse de la création monétaire ex nihilo révèle que notre système économique repose sur une contradiction fondamentale : il tente de simuler une croissance monétaire infinie dans un monde physique fini.

La métaphore des trous nous a montré que la monnaie bancaire actuelle est un instrument de scission : elle crée simultanément la richesse et le vide, l’opulence et la servitude.

Le niveau de dette globale ne peut qu’augmenter, car chaque tentative de remboursement total aboutirait à l’effacement de la monnaie elle-même et donc à l’arrêt des échanges sociaux.

Cette architecture monétaire n’est plus soutenable. Elle condamne les nations à une compétition extractive mondiale pour payer les intérêts d’une dette qui ne peut jamais être soldée collectivement.

La transition vers un ordre monétaire où la création monétaire serait mise au service de la réparation du monde plutôt que de sa consommation n’est pas une simple réforme technique.

C’est un changement de logiciel civilisationnel.

C’est une libération du vivant de la tutelle de l’argent-dette. C’est le passage de la servitude financière à la robustesse écosystémique. C’est la condition sine qua non pour bâtir une économie de l’équilibre durable.

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Pourtant, cet indicateur ne mesure pas ce que nous croyons qu’il mesure. Il ne dit rien du bien-être, de la santé écologique ou de la justice sociale. Conçu dans les années 1930 comme un simple thermomètre de l’activité marchande pour piloter une économie en crise, il est devenu la boussole centrale de décisions qui engagent l’avenir de milliards d’êtres humains et de la planète elle-même.

Comment en sommes-nous arrivés là ? Et surtout : pourquoi continuons-nous à maximiser un indicateur qui ignore systématiquement ce qui compte vraiment ?

1931 : Un outil de crise devenu dogme

L’histoire du PIB commence dans le chaos de la Grande Dépression. En 1931, les États-Unis s’enfoncent dans une spirale déflationniste. Le Congrès américain, aveugle face à l’ampleur de l’effondrement économique, sollicite l’économiste Simon Kuznets pour créer un système capable de mesurer l’étendue du désastre.

Kuznets met au point les bases de ce qui deviendra le Produit Intérieur Brut : un agrégat qui capture la somme des valeurs ajoutées de la production nationale. Mais dès 1934, lors de la présentation de ses travaux, Kuznets formule un avertissement solennel :

“Le bien-être d’une nation ne peut que difficilement être déduit d’une mesure du revenu national.”

Pour lui, le PIB est un outil technique de mesure de l’activité marchande, rien de plus. Il insiste sur le fait que les dimensions sociales, culturelles et environnementales sont essentielles pour juger de la santé réelle d’une société. Ces avertissements seront largement ignorés.

Durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le PIB devient un instrument de pilotage de l’effort de guerre. Après 1945, la conférence de Bretton Woods scelle son internationalisation. Le Fonds Monétaire International et la Banque mondiale l’adoptent comme standard universel. Le PIB devient le symbole du développement, la mesure du progrès, le critère de réussite des nations.

Un outil de crise s’est transformé en dogme permanent.

Ce que le PIB mesure vraiment

Le Produit Intérieur Brut additionne toutes les valeurs ajoutées marchandes produites sur un territoire au cours d’une année. À cela s’ajoute le coût de production des services publics (éducation, santé, justice). C’est tout.

Cette définition crée des zones d’ombre considérables.

L’invisible économique

Le travail domestique, le bénévolat, l’entraide familiale, le potager qui nourrit une famille — tout cela est invisible dans le PIB. Aucune transaction monétaire, aucune comptabilité. Pourtant, ces activités représentent une part immense de ce qui rend une société viable. Des études montrent qu’en France, la production domestique pourrait représenter une hausse de 63 % du PIB si elle était monétarisée, soit près de 700 milliards d’euros.

À l’inverse, des activités délétères ou accidentelles gonflent artificiellement le PIB. Un accident de la route génère des dépenses de réparation, de soins médicaux, de services d’urgence — tout cela est comptabilisé positivement. Une catastrophe naturelle, une marée noire, une épidémie : les dépenses de nettoyage et de reconstruction augmentent le PIB. Le PIB ne fait pas la différence entre ce qui enrichit vraiment la vie et ce qui répare une destruction.

Flux versus stocks : la confusion fondamentale

Le PIB mesure des flux — ce qui est produit cette année. Mais il ignore l’état des stocks : le capital naturel, les infrastructures, la santé de la population, la cohésion sociale.

Un pays peut afficher une croissance robuste en épuisant ses forêts, en vidant ses océans, en détruisant ses sols. Tant que cette extraction génère des transactions marchandes, le PIB augmente. La perte de ces actifs — pourtant irremplaçables — n’apparaît nulle part dans le bilan économique.

En comptabilité privée, on distingue le bénéfice brut du bénéfice net en déduisant l’amortissement du capital. Le PIB, comme son nom l’indique, est brut. Il ne tient pas compte de l’usure du capital physique et ignore totalement la dépréciation du capital naturel.

Nous mesurons le revenu sans jamais vérifier si nous consommons notre patrimoine pour le générer.

L’angle mort écologique : Détruire pour croître

Le reproche le plus fondamental adressé au PIB concerne son aveuglement face aux limites biophysiques de la planète.

Le paradoxe des catastrophes

Le nettoyage d’une marée noire génère des emplois, des ventes de services, de l’activité économique. Le PIB augmente. Pourtant, le patrimoine naturel — la richesse réelle — a été irrémédiablement détruit.

Les soins médicaux pour traiter les maladies liées à la pollution de l’air sont comptabilisés comme une croissance économique, bien qu’ils résultent d’une dégradation de la santé publique.

La construction de stations d’épuration pour traiter une eau devenue impropre à la consommation crée du PIB pour remplacer un service que la nature rendait gratuitement.

Ce mécanisme pervers transforme chaque destruction en opportunité de croissance. Plus nous dégradons les écosystèmes, plus nous devons dépenser pour compenser — et plus le PIB augmente.

Le jour du dépassement

En 2024, le “jour du dépassement” mondial est survenu le 1er août. Cela signifie que l’humanité consomme l’équivalent de 1,7 Terre chaque année. En France, ce seuil est atteint dès le 7 mai.

Le PIB ne reflète en rien cette trajectoire d’effondrement. Il peut croître allègrement pendant que les stocks de poissons s’effondrent, que les forêts disparaissent, que les sols se désertifient, que la biodiversité s’effondre.

L’exemple de l’île de Nauru est emblématique : l’exploitation intensive des phosphates a généré une richesse monétaire immense à court terme. Le PIB par habitant était l’un des plus élevés du monde. Aujourd’hui, l’île est un territoire dévasté, sans base de subsistance, dépendant entièrement de l’aide extérieure. La richesse mesurée par le PIB était une illusion. La vraie richesse — le capital naturel — a été liquidée.

L’angle mort social : Le mirage de la moyenne

Le PIB mesure la “taille du gâteau” économique. Mais il est totalement aveugle à la manière dont ce gâteau est partagé.

Le piège du PIB par habitant

Le PIB par habitant est une moyenne arithmétique. En présence d’inégalités croissantes, cette moyenne peut augmenter alors que la situation de la majorité stagne ou se dégrade.

Si 1 % de la population capte 90 % des gains de croissance, le PIB par habitant augmente. Les statistiques affichent une progression. Mais 99 % des gens ne voient aucune amélioration de leur situation — voire une dégradation. Le PIB ne voit rien de cette réalité.

Le travail invisible des femmes

Une faille structurelle du PIB, soulignée dès l’origine par Kuznets, est l’exclusion du travail domestique et de soin non rémunéré.

La garde d’enfants, l’aide aux personnes âgées, les tâches ménagères — majoritairement effectuées par les femmes — représentent une valeur économique immense. Sans ce travail, l’économie marchande s’effondrerait. Pourtant, il n’apparaît pas dans le PIB.

Cette invisibilité n’est pas anodine. Elle biaise les politiques publiques en ignorant les secteurs qui assurent la reproduction sociale et le bien-être quotidien. Elle dévalue structurellement le travail des femmes et fausse notre compréhension de ce qui fait réellement tourner une société.

Le paradoxe d’Easterlin : Plus riche, pas plus heureux

Au-delà d’un certain seuil de revenu permettant de satisfaire les besoins fondamentaux, l’accroissement des revenus n’entraîne plus de hausse significative du bien-être subjectif.

Plusieurs facteurs expliquent ce phénomène. La satisfaction d’un individu dépend souvent de sa position relative par rapport aux autres plutôt que de son niveau de richesse absolu. Les individus s’habituent rapidement à un niveau de confort supérieur, nécessitant une croissance toujours plus forte pour maintenir le même niveau de satisfaction. Et surtout, la croissance s’accompagne d’effets négatifs sur la qualité de vie : allongement des temps de transport, stress urbain, dégradation des relations sociales.

La course à la croissance du PIB peut ainsi devenir contre-productive pour le bien-être réel qu’elle est censée servir.

Les tentatives de correction : Un foisonnement d’indicateurs alternatifs

Face aux critiques, de nombreux indicateurs ont été développés pour offrir une vision plus équilibrée de la prospérité.

L’Indice de Développement Humain (IDH), créé par le PNUD en 1990, combine santé, éducation et niveau de vie. Il a réussi à déplacer le débat vers le développement humain, mais reste critiqué pour son incapacité à intégrer les inégalités et les enjeux environnementaux.

L’Indicateur de Progrès Véritable (IPV) tente de calculer le “bénéfice net” d’une nation en déduisant les coûts sociaux et environnementaux du PIB. Ses partisans soulignent que si le PIB par habitant a plus que doublé depuis 1950 aux États-Unis, l’IPV a diminué d’environ 45 % depuis 1970. Nous serions entrés dans une phase de “croissance non économique” où les coûts de la croissance dépassent ses bénéfices.

L’Indice de Richesse Inclusive, soutenu par les Nations Unies, agrège le capital produit, humain et naturel. Il démontre que dans de nombreux pays affichant une croissance forte du PIB, la richesse inclusive stagne ou régresse en raison de la destruction du capital naturel.

En 2009, la Commission Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi a formulé douze recommandations pour réformer la comptabilité nationale et intégrer les dimensions sociales et environnementales du progrès. Le rapport insiste sur la nécessité de distinguer l’évaluation du bien-être présent de celle de sa soutenabilité — c’est-à-dire de notre capacité à transmettre aux générations futures un stock suffisant de capital.

Ces initiatives sont précieuses. Elles montrent qu’il est possible de mesurer autrement. Mais elles se heurtent à un obstacle de taille : pourquoi, malgré ces alternatives et malgré les critiques fondées, le PIB reste-t-il l’indicateur central de nos économies ?

La question qui fâche : Pourquoi continuons-nous ?

Les limites du PIB ne sont pas un secret. Les scientifiques, les économistes hétérodoxes et même certaines institutions internationales les dénoncent depuis des décennies. Pourtant, la croissance du PIB reste l’objectif prioritaire de quasiment tous les gouvernements du monde.

Pourquoi ?

La réponse ne se trouve pas dans l’ignorance ou l’aveuglement idéologique. Elle se trouve dans les rouages profonds de notre système économique et financier.

La dette comme moteur de croissance

Dans notre système monétaire actuel, la monnaie est créée par les banques lorsqu’elles accordent des crédits. Chaque euro, chaque dollar en circulation est né d’une dette. Et cette dette porte intérêt.

Pour rembourser le capital et les intérêts, il faut générer plus de richesse monétaire qu’initialement empruntée. Pour générer cette richesse, il faut produire, vendre, consommer. Et recommencer. Toujours plus.

Si la croissance s’arrête, les revenus stagnent. Si les revenus stagnent, les dettes deviennent impossibles à rembourser. Les défauts de paiement se multiplient, les banques vacillent, le système financier s’effondre.

La croissance du PIB n’est donc pas un choix politique parmi d’autres. C’est une nécessité structurelle imposée par la logique même de la création monétaire.

Le rendement du capital

Les investissements ne sont pas réalisés pour améliorer le bien-être planétaire ou la cohésion sociale. Ils sont réalisés pour générer un retour financier.

Une forêt qui respire, un océan en bonne santé, un sol fertile — tout cela ne génère pas de dividendes trimestriels. Cela n’a pas de cours en bourse. Mais une forêt transformée en bois d’œuvre, un océan vidé de ses poissons, un sous-sol percé pour en extraire des minerais — voilà qui peut se convertir en flux de trésorerie.

Pour que le capital investi rapporte, il faut que l’économie croisse. Et pour que l’économie croisse, il faut extraire, transformer, vendre. Peu importe si cette extraction détruit le capital naturel ou dégrade la cohésion sociale — tant que le PIB augmente, les investisseurs sont satisfaits.

Le temps court de la finance, le temps long de l’écologie

Les décisions d’investissement sont dictées par des horizons trimestriels, annuels, rarement au-delà de cinq ans. Les processus écologiques fonctionnent sur des décennies, des siècles, des millénaires.

Acidifier un océan prend quelques décennies. Le restaurer, si tant est que ce soit possible, prendrait des siècles. Mais le marché financier ne voit que le prochain trimestre.

Ce décalage structurel entre la logique financière et la réalité biophysique n’est pas un bug. C’est une caractéristique fondamentale du système.

Le PIB ne mesure pas ce que nous voulons mesurer. Il mesure ce que le système financier a besoin de voir croître pour fonctionner.

Les angles morts écologiques et sociaux du PIB ne sont pas des défauts corrigibles par de meilleures statistiques. Ils sont le reflet d’un système économique organisé autour d’un impératif : la croissance perpétuelle de l’activité marchande, peu importe le coût réel pour le vivant et pour les sociétés humaines.

Conclusion : Le PIB comme symptôme

Le Produit Intérieur Brut est un indicateur obsolète pour piloter des sociétés confrontées aux limites planétaires et aux crises sociales. Mais le remplacer par des indicateurs alternatifs — aussi pertinents soient-ils — ne suffira pas.

Car le problème n’est pas seulement la mesure. Le problème est ce qui force la croissance de ce que nous mesurons.

Tant que la monnaie sera créée par la dette avec intérêt, tant que le capital exigera un rendement perpétuel, tant que le temps financier sera déconnecté du temps écologique, nous serons contraints de maximiser le PIB — quelles que soient les conséquences pour la planète et pour l’humanité.

La question n’est donc plus seulement : “Comment mieux mesurer la prospérité ?”

La question est : “Comment réorganiser les fondements monétaires et financiers de nos économies pour qu’ils cessent d’exiger une croissance infinie dans un monde fini ?”

C’est à cette question — radicale, urgente, essentielle — que nous devons maintenant nous confronter.

Sept sur neuf. Ce n’est pas un détail statistique, c’est un signal d’alerte maximal sur l’état du système de soutien à la vie qui a permis l’émergence et le développement de toutes les civilisations humaines.

Le cadre des limites planétaires : une boussole pour l’habitabilité

Depuis 2009, le concept des limites planétaires fournit une cartographie scientifique de l’espace sûr pour l’humanité. Neuf processus biophysiques régulent la résilience de la Terre : le climat, la biodiversité, les cycles de l’eau, de l’azote et du phosphore, l’intégrité des sols et forêts, la chimie des océans, l’ozone stratosphérique, les aérosols atmosphériques, et la pollution chimique.

Ces limites ne sont pas des préférences politiques ou des objectifs arbitraires. Ce sont des seuils au-delà desquels les systèmes naturels risquent de basculer vers des états nouveaux, potentiellement irréversibles et hostiles à la vie humaine telle que nous la connaissons.

En 2015, deux limites étaient franchies. En 2022, quatre. En 2023, six. Avril 2026 : sept.

L’acidification des océans : le signal d’un système saturé

L’océan absorbe environ 25 à 30 % du CO₂ que nous émettons dans l’atmosphère. Ce service invisible a temporairement ralenti le réchauffement climatique, mais au prix d’une transformation chimique profonde de l’eau de mer.

Le CO₂ dissous forme de l’acide carbonique, libérant des ions hydrogène qui augmentent l’acidité et réduisent la disponibilité de l’aragonite, un carbonate de calcium essentiel aux organismes à coquille et squelette calcaire : coraux, mollusques, plancton calcificateur.

La limite de sécurité était fixée à 80 % du niveau pré-industriel de saturation en aragonite (2,86 Ωarag). Nous sommes maintenant à 2,84 Ωarag. Plus de 40 % de la surface océanique mondiale a franchi ce seuil. Dans les eaux polaires, certaines zones connaissent déjà des périodes de sous-saturation où l’eau devient chimiquement corrosive pour la vie marine.

Les ptéropodes — ces minuscules escargots de mer qui forment la base de la chaîne alimentaire arctique — montrent des signes de dissolution de leur coquille. Le saumon qui en dépend commence à manquer de nourriture. Les récifs coralliens, qui protègent les côtes et nourrissent un quart de la vie marine, se fragilisent. C’est toute l’architecture de la vie océanique qui vacille.

Mais ce n’est qu’une pièce du puzzle.

Un système en cascade : les sept fronts de la déstabilisation

Changement climatique : 423 ppm de CO₂ atmosphérique (limite : 350 ppm). Forçage radiatif de 2,97 W/m², soit trois fois le seuil de sécurité. Chaque fraction de degré supplémentaire amplifie les autres déstabilisations.

Intégrité de la biosphère : taux d’extinction dix fois supérieur au seuil de sécurité. L’humanité s’approprie 30 % de la production primaire nette de la planète, privant les autres espèces de l’énergie nécessaire à leur survie et adaptation.

Changement d’usage des sols : 59 % de la surface forestière conservée (limite : 75 %). La déforestation réduit l’évapotranspiration, assèche les sols, augmente les températures locales, favorise les méga-feux, libère du carbone qui acidifie l’océan.

Eau douce : 22,6 % des terres émergées en anomalie hydrique pour l’eau bleue (rivières et nappes), 22,0 % pour l’eau verte (humidité des sols). L’eau manque là où elle devrait être, inonde là où elle ne devrait pas.

Flux biogéochimiques : 165 Tg d’azote fixé industriellement par an (limite : 62 Tg). 18,2 Tg de phosphore mobilisé (limite : 6,2 Tg). Les cycles naturels sont submergés par les intrants agricoles, créant des zones mortes dans les océans et les lacs.

Nouvelles entités : 350 000 substances synthétiques en circulation, la plupart sans évaluation d’impact. Plastiques, métaux lourds, perturbateurs endocriniens, PFAS éternels — nous avons transformé la chimie planétaire en expérience à ciel ouvert.

Ces sept transgressions ne sont pas indépendantes. Elles interagissent, s’amplifient, créent des boucles de rétroaction qui échappent progressivement au contrôle. La déforestation aggrave le climat qui perturbe l’eau qui stresse la biodiversité qui affaiblit les sols qui nécessitent plus d’intrants chimiques qui polluent les océans qui perdent leur capacité à réguler le climat.

Les scientifiques appellent ce risque “Hothouse Earth” — Terre étuve. Un scénario où les températures mondiales pourraient grimper de 4 à 5 degrés au-dessus des niveaux pré-industriels, même si nous arrêtions toutes nos émissions demain. Un état stable, mais invivable.

La question qui fâche : pourquoi maintenant, pourquoi si vite ?

L’Holocène — ces 11 700 dernières années de stabilité climatique exceptionnelle — a permis l’agriculture, les villes, l’écriture, la civilisation. Pendant des millénaires, l’humanité a prospéré dans un équilibre dynamique avec la biosphère.

Puis, en deux siècles — un battement de cil à l’échelle géologique — nous avons déstabilisé sept des neuf processus régulateurs de la planète.

Ce n’est pas “l’humanité” en tant qu’espèce biologique qui a franchi ces limites. Nos ancêtres chasseurs-cueilleurs vivaient largement dans les capacités de régénération de la Terre. Les premières civilisations agricoles modifiaient leur environnement, certes, mais localement, à un rythme que les cycles naturels pouvaient absorber.

Ce qui a changé, c’est l’avènement d’un système économique particulier : une économie de l’extraction maximale, de la croissance perpétuelle, de la mise en valeur infinie d’une planète finie.

L’économie extractive : moteur de la transgression

Regardons les chiffres autrement.

Changement climatique : 423 ppm de CO₂. Chaque molécule de ce surplus provient de la combustion de combustibles fossiles pour alimenter la production industrielle, le transport de marchandises, la consommation de masse.

Biosphère : nous prélevons 30 % de la production primaire nette. Pour quoi ? Nourrir 8 milliards d’humains, certes, mais surtout alimenter une économie qui convertit la biomasse en produits jetables, en déchets, en profits financiers.

Déforestation : 59 % des forêts conservées. Les 41 % manquants ? Convertis en monocultures d’exportation, en pâturages pour une viande industrielle, en plantations d’huile de palme, en zones minières.

Azote et phosphore : 165 Tg contre 62 Tg. Pourquoi ? Pour maximiser les rendements agricoles dans un modèle d’agriculture industrielle qui doit nourrir une demande globale de viande et de produits transformés en expansion constante.

Nouvelles entités : 350 000 substances. Pourquoi inventer autant de molécules ? Pour créer de nouveaux produits, de nouveaux marchés, de nouveaux besoins, de nouvelles opportunités de profit.

Le pattern est clair : chaque limite franchie correspond à une intensification de l’extraction de ressources naturelles pour alimenter une machine économique qui ne connaît qu’un seul impératif — croître.

Croître en volume de production. Croître en consommation d’énergie. Croître en extraction de matières premières. Croître en flux financiers.

La question devient alors : qu’est-ce qui force cette croissance perpétuelle, même face à l’évidence de la déstabilisation planétaire ?

Le doigt qui pointe vers la finance

Ici, il faut regarder un niveau plus profond. L’économie extractive n’est pas une aberration culturelle tombée du ciel. Elle est organisée, structurée, incitée par un système financier particulier.

Dans notre système monétaire et financier actuel :

La monnaie naît de la dette. Chaque euro, chaque dollar en circulation est créé par une banque lorsqu’elle accorde un crédit. Cette monnaie est accompagnée d’une obligation de remboursement avec intérêt. Pour rembourser, il faut générer plus de richesse monétaire qu’initialement empruntée. Pour générer cette richesse, il faut extraire, transformer, vendre, consommer. Et recommencer. Toujours plus.

Le capital exige un rendement. Les investissements ne sont pas réalisés pour le bien-être planétaire, mais pour générer un retour financier. Une forêt qui respire ne génère pas de dividendes trimestriels. Un océan stable n’a pas de cours en bourse. Mais une forêt transformée en bois d’œuvre, un océan vidé de ses poissons, un sous-sol percé de puits — voilà qui peut se convertir en flux de trésorerie.

La croissance du PIB est l’indicateur de succès. Les gouvernements, les entreprises, les marchés financiers mesurent la santé économique à la croissance du PIB. Plus d’activité = plus de richesse = plus de bien-être, selon la logique dominante. Mais le PIB ne distingue pas entre une activité régénérative et une activité destructrice. Abattre une forêt augmente le PIB. La reconstruction après une catastrophe climatique augmente le PIB. Le traitement des cancers liés à la pollution chimique augmente le PIB.

Le temps financier est court, le temps écologique est long. Les décisions d’investissement sont dictées par des horizons trimestriels, annuels, rarement au-delà de cinq ans. Les processus écologiques fonctionnent sur des décennies, des siècles, des millénaires. Acidifier un océan prend quelques décennies. Le restaurer, si tant est que ce soit possible, prendrait des siècles. Mais le marché financier ne voit que le prochain trimestre.

Ce décalage structurel entre la logique financière et la réalité biophysique n’est pas un bug. C’est une caractéristique fondamentale du système.

Un constat qui ouvre sur une question

Le diagnostic scientifique d’avril 2026 ne laisse aucune place au doute : sept limites sur neuf sont franchies, et les deux restantes montrent des signes de pression locaux inquiétants.

L’analyse économique révèle que ces transgressions ne sont pas accidentelles, mais systémiques. Elles découlent directement d’une économie organisée autour de l’extraction maximale de valeur, propulsée par un impératif de croissance perpétuelle.

Et derrière cette économie extractive, il y a une architecture financière qui crée la monnaie par la dette, qui exige des rendements sur le capital, qui mesure le succès à la croissance du PIB, qui opère sur des cycles de temps incompatibles avec les cycles de régénération de la vie.

Les succès — rares mais réels — comme la restauration de la couche d’ozone montrent que l’humanité possède la capacité technique et politique d’inverser la tendance. Mais le protocole de Montréal a fonctionné parce qu’il s’attaquait à un problème circonscrit (les CFC) sans remettre en cause les fondements de l’économie globale.

Aujourd’hui, nous ne pouvons plus nous permettre ce luxe. Les sept limites franchies sont toutes interconnectées, et toutes ancrées dans la logique profonde de notre système économique et financier.

La question n’est donc plus : “Pouvons-nous ralentir l’extraction ?”

La question est : “Comment réorganiser la création monétaire et les flux financiers pour qu’ils servent la régénération planétaire plutôt que l’extraction continue ?”

C’est à cette question — radicale, essentielle, urgente — que nous devons maintenant nous confronter. Non pas comme un exercice théorique, mais comme l’impératif central de notre survie collective.

Les limites planétaires ont parlé. Il est temps d’écouter, et de repenser les fondements.

https://debunkonomy.org/articles/septieme-limite-planetaire.html

En 2015, 193 pays ont signé un pacte historique : transformer le monde d’ici 2030. Réduire la pauvreté, stopper le dérèglement climatique, garantir l’accès à l’eau, à l’éducation, à la santé. 17 objectifs. 169 cibles. Un agenda planétaire sans précédent.

Nous sommes en 2026. Il reste quatre ans.

Et le bilan est accablant.

35 %. C’est tout.

Selon le rapport annuel des Nations Unies publié en juillet 2025, seules 35 % des cibles des ODD sont en bonne voie. Près de la moitié progressent trop lentement pour atteindre l’objectif à temps. Et 18 % — près d’une cible sur cinq — régressent par rapport à la situation de 2015.

Autrement dit : sur les grandes promesses de 2015, nous reculons sur plusieurs fronts en même temps que nous avançons sur d’autres.

La faim dans le monde ? En recul sur 50 % des indicateurs. La vie maritime et les océans ? 40 % des indicateurs en régression. L’égalité femmes-hommes ? Fragile, fragilisée, menacée.

Comment en est-on arrivé là ?

L’explication officielle : les crises se sont accumulées

Les institutions internationales pointent, à juste titre, une série de chocs : la pandémie de Covid-19, la guerre en Ukraine, la montée des conflits armés, les effets déjà visibles du dérèglement climatique. Des événements imprévus qui ont mis à genoux des progrès durement acquis.

C’est vrai. Mais ce n’est pas toute la vérité.

La vraie question : où est l’argent ?

Les Nations Unies ont chiffré le besoin : pour financer les transitions nécessaires dans les pays en développement, il manque 4 000 milliards de dollars par an. Chaque année. Sans discontinuer jusqu’en 2030 et au-delà.

4 000 milliards. C’est environ quatre fois le PIB de la France.

La coopération internationale, elle, s’effondre. En février 2025, les États-Unis ont fermé l’USAID — la première agence d’aide au développement du monde — du jour au lendemain. Ce retrait a immédiatement paralysé le suivi de dizaines d’indicateurs ODD, notamment sur la santé, la nutrition et l’égalité des sexes dans les pays les plus pauvres.

Et ce n’est pas une anomalie : le financement du développement repose sur un nombre absurdement restreint d’acteurs. En 2022, neuf bailleurs ont fourni 70 % de l’ensemble du soutien mondial. Neuf. Sur 193 pays signataires.

Quand l’un d’eux se retire, le château de cartes vacille.

Mais le problème est plus profond encore

On peut multiplier les appels à la solidarité. On peut espérer que les États riches honorent enfin leurs engagements. On peut plaider pour une réforme de la fiscalité internationale.

Ces chantiers sont nécessaires. Ils ne sont pas suffisants.

Car la vraie question n’est pas : “Comment trouver 4 000 milliards par an ?”

La vraie question est : pourquoi notre système monétaire est-il structurellement incapable de financer ce dont la planète a besoin ?

L’argent n’est pas une ressource naturelle rare. C’est une convention sociale, une architecture de règles. Et cette architecture a été conçue — implicitement, progressivement — pour financer la croissance économique à court terme, pas la régénération des communs planétaires à long terme.

Les ODD ne manquent pas de bonne volonté. Ils manquent d’un système monétaire à la hauteur des défis qu’ils posent (NEMO IMS spoiler).

Ce que tout cela révèle

Nous demandons aux États d’agir comme si le cadre monétaire existant était neutre — un simple outil de comptabilité. Mais il ne l’est pas. Il oriente les flux, récompense certains investissements, pénalise d’autres. Il est profondément biaisé en faveur du présent contre le futur, du privé contre le commun, de l’extraction contre la régénération.

Tant que cette architecture ne changera pas, les ODD resteront ce qu’ils sont aujourd’hui : de belles intentions financées à la marge, par des flux volontaires et fragiles, exposées au premier choc géopolitique venu.

Pour aller plus loin

Ces questions — comment réformer le système monétaire pour qu’il finance la régénération planétaire plutôt que la dette — sont au cœur de mes travaux. Si vous souhaitez explorer une proposition concrète de réforme monétaire internationale, je vous invite à découvrir mes travaux avec NEMO IMS (NEgentropic MOney International Monetary System)

Si cet article vous a été utile, partagez-le. Et si vous souhaitez soutenir ce travail de recherche indépendante, pensez à rejoindre les Architectes de l’équilibre — le cercle des membres fondateurs de cette publication.

Par Jean-Christophe Duval · Debunk’Onomy

Nous vivons une époque étrange. Jamais l’humanité n’a produit autant de richesses. Jamais elle n’a autant détruit ce qui la fait vivre. Les rapports scientifiques s’accumulent, les COP se succèdent — et pourtant les émissions mondiales de CO₂ ont encore battu un record en 2023.

Pourquoi ? Parce que nous continuons à soigner les symptômes sans toucher à la cause. Et la cause, la vraie, est monétaire.

“Et Gaïa dit aux hommes : il est vain de me soigner avec une monnaie que vous puisez au plus profond de mes blessures.”

La monnaie n’est pas un outil neutre. Elle n’est pas simplement un moyen d’échange que les manuels d’économie nous décrivent. Elle est le langage invisible du pouvoir — elle conditionne ce qui existe et ce qui n’existe pas, ce qui est financé et ce qui est condamné à l’invisibilité.

Voici le mécanisme que personne ne vous explique :

La monnaie est créée par les banques — à partir de rien, lors de l’octroi d’un crédit
↓
Chaque euro créé est une dette — avec intérêts à rembourser
↓
Pour rembourser, il faut croître — extraire, produire, consommer toujours plus
↓
Croître, c’est détruire — les sols, les océans, le climat, le vivant

Ce n’est pas une question de mauvaise volonté. C’est une contrainte structurelle. Il est quasiment impossible d’être rentable sans être extractif. Et les activités les plus rentables sont souvent les plus destructrices.

C’est pourquoi une taxe carbone, aussi bien conçue soit-elle, ne suffira pas. C’est pourquoi même la taxe sur les milliardaires, aussi juste soit-elle, ne changera pas la trajectoire de fond. On ne répare pas une porcelaine avec un marteau.

Alors, que faire ?

Ce Substack est né pour explorer une réponse radicale : et si la création monétaire elle-même était adossée non plus à la dette et à l’extraction, mais à la régénération du vivant ? Une monnaie qui se crée à mesure que l’on dépollue les océans, que l’on reforeste, que l’on restaure les sols. Une monnaie qui se dégrade à mesure qu’elle détruit.

C’est le principe du système NEMO IMS — NEgentropic MOney International Monetary System — que j’explore dans mon livre L’Économie de l’Équilibre, publié ce mois-ci.

Ce n’est pas de l’utopie. C’est de la thermodynamique appliquée à la monnaie. C’est l’idée que changer le moteur de l’économie est la seule façon de changer sa direction.

Changer la monnaie, c’est changer ce qui est possible. Et changer ce qui est possible, c’est changer le monde.

Chaque semaine, j’explore ici une facette de cette révolution monétaire nécessaire — avec rigueur, accessibilité, et la conviction que nous n’avons plus le luxe d’éviter les questions fondamentales.