Give 'em what they want.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note

The collapse of the cap-and-trade bill in the Senate this summer constituted the biggest legislative failure of the Obama administration's first two years in office. While the White House and congressional leaders have racked up some big legislative victories, including health care reform, the stakes with the climate bill were arguably greater. Had the measure passed, not only would it have helped stave off the world's foremost environmental threat, global warming, but, by encouraging industries to invest in clean energy, it could also have generated millions of jobs in an economy starved for them.

The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza recently detailed the many reasons for the bill's demise: opposition from coal-state Democrats, tactical mistakes by the White House, and, most of all, the unwillingness of virtually every GOP senator to support the bill--including those like John McCain who had previously favored cap-and-trade but were under attack by Tea Partiers and Fox News.

But I think Lizza missed a more fundamental reason why the legislation failed: the typical voter just couldn't relate to it. The harms it was meant to prevent (rising sea levels and spreading droughts over the course of the next century) seemed remote, even speculative to many people, and hence easy for opponents to sow doubts about. So, too, the promised benefits: jobs in nascent or yet-to-be-created green industries. And the mechanism by which these ends would be accomplished (giving polluting companies tradable carbon-emitting permits based on an overall limit on carbon output) were hard for the average person to fathom, much less get excited about. It was a bill only wonks could love, and even many of them preferred a simple carbon tax to a complex carbon-trading scheme.

But what if we could make a major dent in our carbon output while reviving the economy in a way that ordinary Americans could not only understand but also personally benefit from? In their cover story in this issue, Patrick Doherty and Christopher Leinberger make such a case. They argue that we can create ecologically and economically sustainable growth by tapping the public's abiding love of real estate.

The real estate market is moribund now, say the authors, because developers overbuilt on the suburban fringe--a result of years of government subsidies for new highways and other infrastructure. But a vast wave of new demand for housing is coming, thanks to an epic demographic convergence. Baby boomers...