Before going further, let me ask a question that may seem provocative: what if our ecological crisis were not primarily a crisis of behaviours, but a crisis of architecture? Not a crisis of will, but a crisis of design. Not a problem of insufficient brakes, but the structural absence of brakes in the very engine of our economy.
This is the thesis I have been defending for years, and which I articulate in L'Économie de l'Équilibre: the current monetary system is intrinsically degenerative. It cannot be reformed at the margins. It must be rethought in its fundamental architecture.
Banking money: an engine designed to accelerate
To understand why I speak of degeneration, we must return to the most mundane — and least understood — mechanism of our daily economic life: money creation.
When a commercial bank grants you a loan, it does not draw on pre-existing deposits. It creates scriptural money ex nihilo — literally from nothing — and records it simultaneously as an asset (your debt) and a liability (your account). This is not conspiracy theory: it is the accounting mechanics described by central banks themselves.
This simple mechanism triggers three structural curses:
Curse #1: Debt, compound interest and the metaphor of holes.
When a bank creates money through credit, imagine it digging a hole. The hole is the debt. The shovelfuls of earth above ground level are the money — the cash flow injected into the economy. The mechanism is elegant in its accounting logic: the flow of some enables the reflux of others.
But add compound interest, and everything collapses. With each shovelful, a handful of earth is taken away — to pay savers, shareholders, to feed tax havens. This earth never returns to the circuit. To compensate for this loss, ever larger holes must be dug. The system cannot remain stable: it is condemned to permanent expansion.
And digging bigger holes, in physical reality, means only one thing:
We are compelled to dig ever deeper holes in nature to fill ever larger holes in our accounting ledgers.
Debt is not merely an accounting entry. It is a promise, an obligation: to find tomorrow in nature what is needed to back it with tangible assets. Every interest payment equates to oil to pump, minerals to extract, forests to fell. This is the economic myth of Sisyphus — an absurd and eternal curse in which humanity compels itself to plunder nature in order to succeed economically.
Curse #2: Feedback loops and the impossible decoupling.
The second curse flows directly from the first. Since all money is born from a profitability obligation, and since in the current system profitability rests on extraction, there is no economically neutral act. Physicists recognise here what are called feedback loops.
A few self-evident examples:
A police officer fines me for littering. The fine is denominated in euros — a degenerative currency. To pay it, I must earn that money through a (most likely) extractive activity. I must cause more ecological damage in my profession to pay for an ecological offence.
Floods worsen, insurance premiums rise. To pay them, I must earn money that is earned by causing climate disruption. I must earn my income through activities that cause rising waters, in order to pay a premium meant to protect me from them.
I want to buy organic, drive electric. But the money needed was earned through harmful activities. The ecological value of the product is neutralised by the impact of the activity that made its purchase possible.
Finance the ecological transition through debt? That means creating debt to save the world, then killing the world to repay the debt. Through taxation? Tax is a levy on production — wanting more tax means wanting more extraction.
This list could extend indefinitely. These examples share a single common denominator: the impossible decoupling. As long as money remains subject to extractive logic, decoupling will not merely be difficult — it will be contradictory with the very foundations of the system.
And Gaia said to humanity: it is futile to heal me with money drawn from the depths of my wounds.
Curse #3: The Gordian knot — financial debts versus planetary debts.
The third curse is perhaps the most vertiginous, because it closes the trap upon itself:
Paying off our debts to nature only worsens our financial debts.
Conversely, paying off our financial debts worsens our debts to nature.
The heart of the problem lies here: repairing nature is not profitable, but destroying it is. High-impact activities generate an average margin of 15%. Low-impact activities, 5%. Regenerative activities — reforestation, depollution, soil restoration — represent 100% in costs. Zero short-term profitability.
If we finance regeneration through taxation, we fall into a fiscal Jevons paradox: to maintain the revenues needed for repair, production must increase — which cancels out the initial ecological benefits. We must destroy in order to earn the means to repair.
Your company can adopt the most eco-responsible processes imaginable: as long as the other links in the economic chain do not operate with the same intention, you will remain an island of gentleness lost in an ocean of brutality. This is the chain metaphor: microeconomic efforts, however sincere, remain futile as long as the global macroeconomic architecture remains unchanged.
Debt is not merely a figure on a screen. It is a mortgage on the biosphere.
Is this system unique? No — but it is dominant and structuring.
I must clarify something essential here: interest-bearing banking money is not the only monetary architecture that has existed in human history. Far from it.
Indigenous communities practised for millennia forms of exchange based on reciprocity and gift. Local complementary currencies — from Local Exchange Trading Systems to the Swiss WIR — demonstrated that economic circuits could be organised without debt-based money creation. Some medieval civilisations operated with demurrage currencies — currencies that lost value over time, discouraging hoarding and encouraging circulation. Silvio Gesell theorised this at the start of the 20th century. More recently, publicly issued currencies, community-governed cryptocurrencies, and sovereign money proposals (100% money) illustrate the diversity of possible architectures.
The current system — based on private banking creation with interest, operating at planetary scale — is therefore not a natural inevitability. It is a historical choice, institutionalised over centuries, consolidated by 20th-century financial deregulation, and today so dominant that it has become invisible. Like water to a fish.
What distinguishes it from alternatives is precisely what makes it degenerative: its imperative of perpetual growth, embedded at the very heart of its accounting mechanics.
A world without money? Careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I often perceive, in degrowth and radical ecology circles, a temptation to reject money as such. Understandable. But, in my view, profoundly mistaken.
Money, in principle, is an extraordinary social technology. It enables large-scale coordination between strangers. It makes specialisation, division of labour, and the accumulation of transmissible knowledge possible. It is, as David Graeber reminds us, first and foremost a relationship of trust — a contract of deferred reciprocity between members of a community.
It is not money that is the problem. It is the architecture of the system in which it circulates.
Conflating the two is like blaming fire for existing because a house burned down. Fire can warm, cook, illuminate — or destroy, depending on the framework in which it operates.
Eliminating money in societies of our size and complexity would amount to amputating our collective coordination capacity without offering anything in its place. This is not reform — it is disorganisation. And in the context of an ecological transition that demands unprecedented mobilisation of human and material resources, such disorganisation would be catastrophic.
The question is not: is money necessary? The answer is yes. The question is: what kind of money, created how, issued by whom, to serve what?
The car without brakes — a metaphor that works.
Before going further, a confusion must be cleared that paralyses the debate: I do not in any way regard money as energy. It does nothing by itself. It does not heat, propel, or destroy. I consider money not as energy, but as a vector and orienter of human desires and motivations. This is precisely why its architecture matters above all else — it produces nothing, but it orients everything.
I use money as fuel here solely for the purposes of the metaphor. Let us keep this image for what it is: a pedagogical tool, not a definition.
Let us reason with the complete vehicle.
The fuel is money. Today, this fuel is created almost exclusively through banking debt. Each injection requires an extractive return to service interest. The engine is programmed to accelerate: the more it runs, the more it consumes, the more must be injected.
The engine is the monetary diffusion architecture — the mechanism by which money comes into existence, circulates through institutional channels, and orients flows of human activity. In the current architecture, these channels direct flows massively towards extraction: that is where profitability lies, that is where the fuel goes.
The oil is the macroprudential devices — interest rates, reserve ratios, central bank policies, green bonds, carbon taxes. It can be changed, filtered, added to. But if the engine is designed to accelerate without brakes, the oil changes nothing about the trajectory.
And this is the fundamental diagnosis: this vehicle has no brakes, and if its engine is designed so that money is the vector of extraction, the vehicle will always accelerate towards the most degenerative activities.
This is not an oversight. It is a structural consequence. Attempting to slow down — degrowth, sobriety, transition — amounts to sticking your feet out of the door while the engine races. The brakes we have built — environmental standards, carbon markets, green taxation — are soft brakes, external to the engine, cancelled with every turn of the wheel by the rebound effect. Meadows called them low-level levers: apparently effective, deeply inoperative.
The car races at high speed towards planetary limits. And, trapped in our dogmatic beliefs, no one is inventing a genuine braking system, nor a motor architecture capable of dissipating the fuel (money) as it dissipates the real (ecosystems).
NEMO IMS: rebuilding the vehicle with integrated braking
What I propose with NEMO IMS is not to repair the existing vehicle. It is to design a new one, with a radically different architecture.
A dual-channel fuel. Part of the money continues to be created through the classic banking circuit — the Yang channel, commercial, production-oriented. But part is now issued directly by central banks as remuneration for certified regenerative activities — the Yin channel, disconnected from debt, anchored in the restoration of living systems. The fuel itself changes in nature.
A dissipative architecture with oriented channels. Monetary flows circulate within an architecture that directs them differently according to their use. Where the current system rewards extraction, the new architecture rewards regeneration.
Brakes integrated into the engine — differential demurrage. This is the central and most innovative mechanism. At each transaction, a fraction of money is removed from the circuit — this is the transactional melt, or demurrage. But this melt is not uniform: it is differential according to the ecological impact of the activity.
- Degenerative use → strong melt → powerful, progressive, inexorable braking
- Regenerative use → near-zero melt → free-wheel, preserved flow
This brake is not an external tax that a lobby can annul, that a government can suspend in a crisis, or that a rebound effect can neutralise. It is inscribed in the very architecture of money. It selectively slows the wheels that destroy, without immobilising the entire vehicle.
The result: no longer an unwanted high speed towards collapse, but a regulated speed — the conscious piloting of robustness. The economy does not stop functioning. It learns to travel at the pace that planetary limits allow, directing its energy where it regenerates rather than where it destroys.
NEMO IMS: what this new vehicle makes possible
This architectural change is not an end in itself. What it unlocks is what counts.
The Yin channel of NEMO IMS enables the monetisation of what I call the insolvent essential: everything the market neglects because it generates no short-term return, but whose absence destroys our foundations. Ocean depollution is not profitable — it becomes so. Reforestation represents 100% in costs — it is now remunerated. Fundamental research, care, education, biodiversity preservation: everything banking money ignores because no bank will ever lend to heal Gaia for free.
This mechanism reverses a structural injustice: today, whoever repairs the planet does so voluntarily, while whoever destroys it grows rich. NEMO IMS creates the conditions for a world where the less one destroys, the more one deserves.
At the international level, the NEMO Exchange Standard extends this logic. It proposes replacing dollar dominance — and the race to extraction it imposes on Global South countries to defend their currencies — with a neutral universal accounting system, anchored in ecosystemic robustness criteria. We move from a hegemon based on military and financial power to one based on preserving the Earth's habitability.
Changing money means changing the world
I am aware that all of this may seem vertiginous. Too systemic to be actionable. Too radical to be political.
But consider the alternative: continuing to pile peripheral reforms on a structurally broken engine, and wondering why the vehicle keeps accelerating. The efforts of ecologists, degrowth activists, all those who fight for life — I respect them deeply. But as long as money continues to be issued as a promise of extraction, they will be trying to brake a vehicle travelling at 130 km/h by sticking their feet out of the door.
The transition will not happen through the accumulation of virtuous energies on an entropic financial engine. It will happen through a mutation of monetary fuel itself.
Changing money means redefining what we consider precious. It means collectively deciding that restoring a forest is worth as much — or more — than felling it. That caring for a child is worth as much as selling an SUV. That the robustness of the living world is worth more than the quarterly profitability of a speculative fund.
This is the major challenge of the 21st century. And this is the meaning of NEMO IMS.
Jean-Christophe Duval