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The article focuses on the role of economic instruments as part of various attempts to financialize the environment and create environmental markets. It reveals that the use of these instruments is at the crossroads of several logics that took shape at different historical moments. These logics overlap each other, they coexist and hybridize. The article especially considers the political and cognitive work by promoters of economic instruments. These instruments operate at three levels: they act as a detour to try to set the price of non-market goods by means of approximation; they resort to charm offensives, which aim to shape meanings and representations in order to impose the market as the only possible policy horizon; and they act as a means to conceal practices that involve overexploitation, dispossession and the exercise of normalized violence.