"The tragedy of the horizon is that the cycles of business, policy and geology don't match those of the climate. Today's decisions will be judged by generations who have no voice yet."
— Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, Lloyd's of London, 2015
There is a lucidity in these words that stings — precisely because they come from someone who knows the system from the inside. Mark Carney is not describing a moral failing. He is diagnosing an architectural failure: the time of finance and the time of the living world are structurally incompatible.
Ten years after that speech, nothing has shifted in the foundations. Oil profits keep breaking records. Soils keep eroding. Forests keep burning. And balance-sheet algorithms keep smiling at the shareholders of extractivism.
This is not a paradox. It is a mechanism.
Extractivism produces short-term private profits. Regeneration produces diffuse, long-term civilizational benefits. This imbalance is not inevitable — it is the product of a monetary architecture that we can choose to change.
I. The clock of capital against the clock of the living world
Conventional financial markets operate on a horizon of 2 to 10 years. That is the timeframe of an investment cycle, a management mandate, a quarterly strategy. Within that interval, an oil company is a profitability machine: the average return on capital employed in the sector hovered between 6% and 9% over 2010–2022, according to the International Energy Agency. In 2022, the sector hit record peaks: ExxonMobil booked $55.7 billion, Shell $40 billion.
Nature operates on a different temporal register. A primary forest takes centuries to reach ecological maturity. Agricultural soil degraded by intensive monocultures needs between 20 and 100 years to recover its biological structure. A coral reef, under optimal conditions, regenerates over several decades.
These two clocks cannot be read on the same dial. The result is mathematical: in the current financial system, extractivism is rational. Every barrel of oil extracted, every forest razed, every aquifer drained generates a stream of private, immediate, measurable value — recorded on a balance sheet as a performing asset. The destruction of the living substrate is externalized: invisible in the accounts, borne by the collective, deferred onto future generations.
This is not an anomaly. It is the model.
II. Regeneration: the investment the system cannot see
By contrast, regenerative activities — soil restoration, reforestation, wetland rehabilitation, living agriculture — present a financial profile that condemns them in advance: zero accounting profitability, 100% costs in conventional balance sheets.
Why? Because current accounting systems are blind to the living world. Restoring soil is recorded as an operating expense, not an investment. Nature does not appear on a corporate balance sheet as an asset. There is no accounting line for "reconstituted ecosystem capital". So a company that regenerates the conditions of its own existence — water, soil, air — is accountably indistinguishable from one that is liquidating its assets.
And yet what regeneration produces is real and substantial: civilizational robustness. Climatic resilience. Long-term food security. Watershed health. Ecosystem stability — the foundation of all human activity. These benefits are diffuse. They are collective. They unfold over decades. They cannot be converted into quarterly dividends.
This is precisely why the tragedy of horizons is not merely a short-termism problem. It is a structural impossibility as long as money remains what it is: a debt contracted against future growth, demanding extractive returns to be repaid.
III. The monetary lock: when debt finances destruction
We must go to the root of the problem.
Contemporary money is created ex nihilo, by commercial banks at the moment a credit is granted. It is backed by a promise of repayment with interest — which structurally mandates continuous growth of the money supply, and therefore continuous growth of economic activity.
But in a biophysical system with finite resources, "continuous growth of activity" translates almost mechanically into "continuous extraction of nature".
Debt-money cannot finance regeneration — not for lack of political will, but because regeneration does not produce the monetary flows needed for repayment. It produces life, resilience, durability. These attributes have no nominal value in a debt-based system. We will not escape the tragedy of horizons through tax incentives or green labels. We escape it by rebuilding the very architecture of money creation.
IV. NEMO IMS: recoding the horizon of money
This is the central proposition of the NEMO IMS system (Negentropic Money International Monetary System): disconnect money creation from debt, and reconnect it to the measurable regeneration of the living world.
In the conventional system, money is born from a promise of future growth — and disappears with the repayment of debt. It is intrinsically entropic: it pushes the system toward extraction in order to perpetuate itself.
In the NEMO framework, money is born from an act of present and measurable regeneration — ecosystem restoration, reconstitution of living carbon stocks, rehabilitation of degraded soil. It is negentropic: it rewards biological order rather than its dismantlement.
In practice, this implies three fundamental ruptures. A living anchor for money: monetary value is no longer guaranteed by a gold stock or a debt promise, but by verifiable biophysical indicators — biomass, biodiversity, the water cycle, carbon sequestration. An inversion of the profitability signal: what is today accounted as a "cost" (restoring soil, replanting forest) becomes the foundation of legitimate monetary issuance — regeneration is no longer a cost, it is the source of value. A temporal architecture compatible with the living world: by making money creation dependent on the reconstitution of natural capital, NEMO mechanically aligns the horizon of finance with the horizon of life. There is no longer a clock conflict: the return on capital and the regeneration of ecosystems become coextensive.
This is not an accounting utopia. It is a technical response to a technical failure. The tragedy of horizons was born of a monetary architecture — it will only be resolved by a different monetary architecture.
Robustness is the only return that lasts
Olivier Hamant, biologist and research director at INRAE, stated it with a clarity that should be printed in every economics textbook: living systems are robust before they are efficient. Performance without robustness is a flash in the pan — intense, visible, brief.
Extractivism is a civilizational flash in the pan. It shines in every annual report. It leaves only ashes on the horizon of generations.
The great question posed by the tragedy of horizons is not moral. It is pragmatic: what tool do we need so that money can see as far ahead as the living world?
NEMO IMS is one answer to that question. Not the only possible one. But one of the rare propositions that tackles the lock at exactly the point where it is located — in the very nature of money.
Until we reform that lock, we will keep applauding ExxonMobil's record profits while the planet sends the bill to our children. This is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism.
And mechanisms, at least, can be replaced.
Jean-Christophe Duval