Debt free money had been done before in history. Wörgl, a town in Austria did just that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl#:~:text=The%20W%C3%B6rgl%20Experiment,-One%20Schilling%20note&text=W%C3%B6rgl%20was%20the%20site%20of,as%20Stamp%20Scrip%2C%20or%20Freigeld

For many decades, Switzerland had it's own non-debt complementary currency, the WIR. WIR is sadly now sold to a private bank.

There had been thousands of efforts around the world and in the US to create debt-free local currencies. Most of them failed because it is a lot of work running a currency system and because most people are too indoctrinated about "hard cash" and don't trust anything else. I started and ran a somewhat operational one in the Bay Area for 5 years but eventually closed it down due to burnout.

The Public Bank movement tries to re-create state owned banks. There used to be many but today the only one left is the one in North Dakota. Public banks gives states, counties, or municipalities the ability to create debt-free money backed by their tax revenue. The politics surrounding it is complex. Private interests want to make this money available only to private banks. Advocates prefer that the money can only be used to fund state budgets. However, an embarrassment is that North Dakota public bank money was used to fund police deployment against the water protectors at the Keystone XL pipeline protests. So personally, I feel a public bank must also have an elected governing board that can ensure the money is used only for public good, not oligarchic interests.

Money, or how money is created and circulated, is indeed the root of many of today's dysfunction. It gets even more interesting when we add climate change mitigation to the mix...