We are the Unhireables. We went to college. We got good grades. We stayed out of trouble. We interned. We applied. We interviewed. We did everything we were supposed to do. And no one hired us.

This is the story of a generation. My generation. We’re in our 20s and early 30s. They call us the Millennials. But lately it seems a more accurate name would be the Unhireables.

The previous generation didn’t have this problem. In the 1990s, unemployment was low. The job market was strong. Now, I hear people my age say things like, “What job market?”

In 2000, the United States had the lowest unemployment rate for 25-to-34-year-olds in the industrialized world. Now, we have one of the highest rates.

Last month marked the 53rd month in a row that the unemployment rate was in double digits for 18-to-29-year-olds. It fell from 11.7 percent to 11.1 percent, but mostly for the wrong reasons.

The unemployment numbers don’t tell the real story. They don’t count someone as “unemployed” if they’ve stopped looking for a job — for example, out of frustration after too many failed attempts — and that eliminates a lot of unemployed Americans who desperately need a job. Fewer people are job-hunting today than they were a couple years ago, and we can’t blame it on the aging Baby Boomers because they’re actually trying to work more to make up for the savings they lost during the recession.

Here’s a more relevant statistic: Before the recession, over 63 percent of the American population had a job. During the recession, it plummeted below 59 percent, and it’s flatlined ever since. In the last four years, the economy has grown, but the job market has stayed exactly the same.

For the unemployed, there has been no recovery. The recession never ended. It has lasted six years — and counting!

There is no parallel for this in postwar history. My generation is alone in this experience. No other living generation has graduated into a job market that has been so bad for so long.

I’ve heard it said that it’s all a matter of education. College graduates have a lower unemployment rate than the less educated, so isn’t the real problem a lack of skills, not a lack of jobs?

If you’re asking this question, then you haven’t talked to many young college graduates. Over half of bachelor’s degree-holders under 25 are unemployed or underemployed — meaning they’re working part-time when they want to work full-time. Half of all employed college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree, and over a third of them are working in jobs that only require a high school diploma.

Even graduate school isn’t the meal ticket it used to be. Only about half of all law school graduates are working in full-time legal jobs.

And the longer they stay unemployed, the less likely they are to get a good job. More job openings tend to bring down the unemployment rate, but not the long-term unemployment rate. In fact, one recent experiment found that the long-term unemployed got fewer callbacks from potential employers even if they had far superior qualifications than the other job candidates. As Paul Krugman recently put it, we are “creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.”

But it’s worse than that: We are creating a permanent generation of jobless Americans — a generation whose earning potential will always be stunted by the bad luck they had of graduating at the wrong time, a time when their nation abandoned them, ignored their plight, pretended they didn’t exist, blamed them for a crisis that they didn’t cause.

It must have been nice to live in an economy where people were rewarded for sacrificing and studying and working hard. But that was before our time. And so, we press on: searching, stressing, toiling, waiting. This is our burden. This is our story. We are the Unhireables.

==========

This op-ed was published in today’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

James Gaddy knows manure. Chicken manure, to be exact. He’s spent years working with it. That may not sound like much fun to you and me, but Gaddy is on a mission to power the earth — and, in the process, save it.

Specifically, Gaddy has figured out a way to produce ethanol from the bacteria in chicken manure. And it’s cellulosic ethanol, not the corn-based kind that siphons land in Iowa, jacks up the price of food, and results in almost as much greenhouse gas emissions as gasoline. No, this stuff is the real deal. It dramatically reduces greenhouse gases, and it comes from something we were going to throw away anyway.

I used to write about cellulosic ethanol, back when I first starting writing op-ed columns over six years ago. That was before the Great Recession — before we all became obsessed with the economy. People were more concerned about environmental issues then.

The most popular policy I proposed was a Manhattan Project for the 21st century: a national investment in a range of alternative energy technologies that would wean us off foreign oil and dramatically increase the efficiency of our energy use. It would be a public-private partnership. The free market would lead the way, creating and selling the products, but they would be supported by startup capital and loan guarantees from the federal government, the only entity big enough to absorb the upfront costs for a new national infrastructure, as it did in the days of Eisenhower and Roosevelt and even Jefferson.

People loved that idea. They saw it as this generation’s “we choose to go to the moon” moment. When the economy started to weaken in 2007, they liked the idea even more. Now, it wasn’t just investing in the future; it was creating jobs for today.

And it wasn’t just Democrats. The majority of my readers were Republicans, and they thought it was a great way to distance ourselves from Middle Eastern oil producers without a lot of government regulation.

According to a survey released earlier this week, their opinion hasn’t changed. The Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University polled Republicans and independents who vote Republican, and they found that 77 percent think we should use more renewable energy. A majority of them believe this so strongly that they think it’s worth the cost of any government intervention that may be necessary to achieve that goal. In fact, when they read the 2012 Republican Party platform, which doesn’t mention climate change but does celebrate coal and oil, two-thirds of them disagreed with it.

So I think it’s fair to say that Americans of both parties still want a large, Manhattan-style investment in renewable energy. Which brings me back to James Gaddy.

In Vero Beach, Florida, the Swiss company INEOS is building a biorefinery that will use Gaddy’s research to convert waste into eight million gallons of ethanol every year, all the while powering itself and creating electricity for others to use. This project would not have happened without a $50 million grant from the federal government, one of many grants included in the 2009 stimulus that has become so unpopular.

In fact, as investigative reporter Michael Grunwald documents in exhaustive detail in his book The New New Deal, the 2009 stimulus was “the biggest and most transformative energy bill in U.S. history,” funding everything from electric vehicles to high-speed rail, from biorefineries to wind farms, from solar panel manufacturing to home weatherization.

As it turned out, we got our Manhattan Project, and no one noticed. The Obama administration didn’t sell it, the media didn’t report it, and the Republicans in Congress did everything in their power to hide it and discredit it.

It wasn’t enough, but it was a start — and if the George Mason poll is any indication, it won’t be the end. The enemies of progress can stand in our way, but they can’t hold us back.

==========

This op-ed was published in yesterday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel.