IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG, when I set out to find a green job this spring, to discover something fairly critical about myself: I have no skills. "We'll fire you!" our editor, Chris, had joked, "and you can get a green job!" We'll see who has the last laugh, I smirked, when I'm making bank installing solar panels across town.

My dream collapsed just a few mornings later, outside an off-the-grid monster home in the New Mexico desert. I was standing with 25 other would-be solar geniuses from the Santa Fe Community College, ogling the homeowner's Wattsun dual-axis trackers as the 4.59-kilowatt array slowly swiveled—whirrrrr—in pursuit of the low morning sun. By the time we made it into the power room, a pristine bunker full of enough third-party converters and banks of batteries to run the Red October, it was clear that there was no way in hell I was installing solar panels.

I wasn't the only disheartened soul. "See, I'm not gonna come out and install that," said one of the students as he looked dolefully out at the array. "It's too late in life for me."

Tell me about it.