The portrayal of economic instruments as neutral tools removes them from public scrutiny and gives them into the hands of economists and regulators. In fact the decision about levels of pollution, far from being decided in a separate stage of policy making, remains with the polluters since they are given the choice of discharging their pollution or paying the charge or price for a pollution credit. The polluters decide what trade-offs should be made between economics and environmental quality.

Market-based measures grant the highest decision-making power over environmental quality to those who currently make production decisions now. A market system gives power to those most able to pay. Corporations and firms rather than citizens or environmentalists will have the choice about whether to pollute (and pay the charges or buy credits to do so) or clean up. Tradeable pollution rights mean that permission to pollute is auctioned to the highest bidder (Goodin, 1992). Very polluting or dirty industries can stay in business if they can afford the pollution charges or can buy up credits. In this way, companies can choose whether or not to change production processes or introduce innovations to reduce their emissions.

The power of environmentalists is in the political and community sphere yet the popular control of levels of pollution is in fact reduced in this way. The rationale for economic instruments threatens to drastically reduce the scope for public participation in such decisions. Currently communities can influence governments to protect the environment through legislation by campaigning and demonstrating as well as by voting. In a system where the optimum level of environmental protection is decided 'automatically' by a market responding to prices which are supposed to have incorporated environmental costs, community influence is far more difficult. The power of the consumer is not evenly distributed (the wealthy, businesses and bureaucracies have far greater consumer clout) and alternatives are often not available.

White (1992) argues, as many others have, that the market, far from being free or operating efficiently to allocate resources in the interests of society, is dominated by a small group of large multinational corporations which aim to maximise their private profit by exploiting nature and people.

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