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
| Criterion | Dollar Standard (Debt-Money) | Decentralised Alternatives (Crypto / BRICS) | NEMO IMS |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source of money creation | Private bank credit as debt | Algorithms (Bitcoin) or commodity baskets (BRICS) | Dual circuit: gift-money for public goods, regulated credit for the market |
| Growth constraint | Maximum: compound interest demands continuous extraction | Moderate to strong: programmed scarcity perpetuates accumulation | Neutralised: decoupling from debt halts the expansion imperative |
| Flow orientation | Short-term financial returns | Technological or commodity rent capture | Planned toward the insolvent essential and ecological robustness |
| International trade | Asymmetric: dollar dominance, forced accumulation of reserves | Conflictual: currency wars, instability, speculation | Balanced via NES, without hegemonic intermediary |
| Integration of biophysical limits | None: the biosphere is a free externality | Weak: thermodynamic cost is suffered or exploited as collateral | Absolute: transactional melting indexed on lifecycle analysis |
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).
Jean-Christophe Duval