There is a promise running through every contemporary political discourse, from Brussels to Davos: we can keep growing and save the planet. We just need to "green" growth. This promise is called green growth. It rests on the hypothesis of decoupling — the conviction that GDP expansion can be permanently dissociated from biospheric destruction.
This book — L'Économie de l'Équilibre — is partly built as a rigorous refutation of that promise. What you are reading here is a foretaste.
Half a century of coupling: the unambiguous data
If decoupling were real, we should observe a divergence between the GDP curve and the resource extraction curve. The data shows the opposite. Since 1970, global extraction of raw materials has been multiplied by four, from 27 billion tonnes to over 100 billion tonnes in 2024. This curve closely tracks global GDP.
Global resource productivity — GDP produced per tonne extracted — improved by 40% between 1970 and 2000. Between 2000 and 2024? The improvement is only 4%. The global economy has entered a phase of re-materialisation: each point of growth again requires a near-proportional increase in physical extraction.
Relative versus absolute decoupling
The literature distinguishes two types. Relative decoupling means environmental impact keeps growing, but slower than GDP. This is the "progress" typically celebrated in official reports — even as the burden on the biosphere increases.
Absolute decoupling — the only kind that matters for planetary limits — requires GDP to rise while environmental impact falls in real, total terms. To be a viable solution, it must be global (not a relocation), permanent, total (all impacts), and fast (compatible with keeping warming below 1.5°C). This form of decoupling has never been observed for any national economy, over a sustained period, without hidden externalisation.
Entropy does not negotiate
Green growth treats the laws of thermodynamics as obstacles engineering will eventually overcome. The second law states something irrevocable: in any transformation process, part of the quality of energy and matter is irreversibly lost.
The circular economy illustrates this perfectly. 100% recycling is physically impossible: each cycle degrades the material and requires fresh energy inputs. The more diluted a material in a waste stream, the more exponentially the energy needed to recover it rises. The circular economy can slow material throughput — it cannot cancel it in a growing system.
The Jevons paradox: efficiency as accelerator
In 1865, Jevons observed: as the steam engine became more efficient, total coal consumption exploded. Efficiency makes the resource accessible to new uses, new scales. The mechanism is intact today.
LED lighting is 80% more efficient than incandescent: the planet is increasingly lit at night. Modern aviation consumes 80% less fuel per passenger-km than in 1960: global air traffic has multiplied tenfold. Efficiency is necessary. Without absolute consumption caps, it is radically insufficient.
The European decoupling: a border illusion
The EU proudly presents data showing falling territorial emissions alongside growing GDP. But when we shift to a consumption footprint approach — integrating emissions embedded in imports — the picture changes. In 2023, emissions induced by EU consumption were 21% higher than its territorial emissions. Around 35% of its real carbon footprint is emitted outside its borders.
Absolute decoupling in rich countries is largely a statistical construct made possible by globalisation.
The energy transition does not escape matter
The shift to renewables is essential. But it is also deeply material. Producing an electric vehicle requires approximately six times more minerals than a combustion vehicle. The IEA projects that demand for critical minerals must increase fourfold to sixfold by 2040 to meet climate targets.
We reduce emissions at the exhaust pipe; we massively increase mining, water pollution, and soil destruction. Shifting the impact is not decoupling.
Add to this the decline in energy return on investment (EROI). The fossil fuels that powered the industrial revolution had an EROI of 100:1. Today, oil averages around 30:1; European photovoltaics can fall to 4:1 when storage is included. Below 5–10:1, a growing share of produced energy must be reinvested in the energy system itself. Net GDP growth becomes a thermodynamic dead end.
The question nobody asks: why must we grow?
Green growth doctrine fails biophysically. But it also fails because it asks the wrong 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 as debt, in a system that demands repayment of principal and interest. The economy must grow for debts to be honoured. Growth is not an ideological choice — it is an arithmetic constraint built into the mechanism of money creation.
This is precisely the problem that NEMO IMS (NEgentropic MOney International Monetary System) seeks to solve at the root. A currency whose creation is conditioned not on debt and growth, but on the regeneration of natural commons. A currency that does not impose growth, but makes it possible where it is desirable — and unnecessary where it is destructive.
Seven of nine planetary boundaries breached
The conclusion is written in the current state of the biosphere. In 2025, seven of the nine planetary boundaries have been breached: climate change, biosphere integrity, land use, freshwater, biogeochemical flows, novel entities, ocean acidification. These transgressions do not result from a lack of technology. They result from a system whose internal logic is incompatible with the conditions for the regeneration of life.
Accepting the impossible decoupling is not a renunciation of progress. It is a return to biophysical lucidity — the sine qua non for building real prosperity in a finite world.
This text is a foretaste of L'Économie de l'Équilibre — Monnaie, Finance et Limites Planétaires, forthcoming from Debunk Éditions (June 2026).
Jean-Christophe Duval