There is a distinction between wanting something for private consumption, and wanting something as a shared good, a public good, like reduced air pollution.
Private consumption planning (your plan for what you are going to consume, as far as this has an impact on resource demands, over the next planning period) gets simply aggregated by the consumption councils into a total, that is the total initial proposal for consumption for that geographic region.
Consider the issue of air pollution. Pollutants generated by some industry or by mobile sources like autos may have a primary impact within some region around a city, say. So this may be an issue that is raised within the regional consumption federation.
Campaigns or proposals might emerge within the regional federation for reductions of certain pollutants, such as carbon monoxide or whatever. A target might be proposed -- perhaps there is an R&D organization attached to the regional fed -- together with a proposed strategy for how to do that. This will have an impact on the various industries. They will need to come back with an estimate of what this is going to cost. Maybe this kind of investigation has been going on for some time, perhaps during the previous planning period, and proposals are now reaching fruition.
People in that region may decide that the target is too ambitous, based on the cost estimates, and so they reduce the target reduction for this next planning period. Eventually through this back and forth process, a plan is settled on, that is, a target is incoporated in the region's consumption plan proposal.
Once a plan is arrived at, the cost that is determined for the amount of pollution reduction the region wishes to "buy" then is a price, a social cost, to each emitter of that pollutant. So, a firm that has a higher reliance on emitting that pollutant now is recognized as not being as efficient as it might seem in purely market terms, that is, it has higher costs assigned to it.
Tom Wetzel