Environmentalists are not well known for defending people’s right to work or to maintain their living standards. Most of them see employment as just another CO2-producing human pastime — unless you have a “green job,” that is, such as making hemp garments for rich people eaten alive by eco-guilt — and they look upon high living standards as the midwife of increased consumerism. And that, of course, is a Very Bad Thing. So it is with some surprise that I have been reading recently about British environmentalists rushing to a factory on the Isle of Wight to defend 600 people from being made redundant.

The Vestas factory — the major producer of wind turbines in Britain — says it plans to close up shop and move overseas, where production costs are lower. Five hundred workers will be out of a job in the next week or so. In an attempt to save their jobs, some of the workers occupied the factory while others protested outside. They were joined by greens, who were effusive in their newfound worker-supporting militancy. Plane Stupid, the youthful and aristocratic anti-flying group, has been cheering the “industrial disobedience and workers’ solidarity” at Vestas; other greens have been marching behind the rather sweeping slogan: “Save Vestas, Save Jobs, Save the Planet.”

This sudden embrace of workers’ plight by various environmentalists — including green toffs — does not indicate an interest in the plight of the working man or in encouraging full and gainful employment; rather it only serves to highlight their planet-before-people misanthropy. Environmentalists have descended on the Isle of Wight only because they consider the jobs at Vestas — involving the construction of “planet-saving” wind turbines — to be “clean” jobs, decent, respectable, worthy of defence. Most of the time, greens implicitly campaign for people to be thrown out of work.

The slogan that is being wielded to defend the Vestas workers — “Save the Planet” — has been used before by greens to demand the closure of industries that employ thousands of people. Some of the same greens protesting alongside the workers on the Isle of Wight have spearheaded the campaign to shut down Drax in North Yorkshire, Britain’s largest coal-fired power station — which environmentalists describe as “Drax the Destroyer . . . a great beast, belching steam and gas into the air in an unending stream.” Drax directly employs 700 people, and also supports numerous other local jobs and companies. But they’re “dirty workers,” so it doesn’t matter about them.

Environmentalists have also taken direct action against the Kingsnorth coal-and-oil power station in Kent, and are campaigning vigorously to prevent the construction of a second Kingsnorth power station. Kingsnorth currently employs 160 workers and 90 agency workers and the building of another station — which is necessary to meet Britain’s energy needs — would involve employing 3,000 construction workers. Greens care little for their livelihoods. One of the current big campaigns of British environmentalists is to prevent the construction of the Third Runway at Heathrow Airport — something that would create an estimated 65,000 jobs.

Environmentalists support the closure of coal-fired power stations not because such facilities are outdated and workers might be better employed in getting Britain’s nuclear industry off the ground; most of them oppose nuclear power, too. Their interest in the rights of Vestas workers is about elevating “green jobs” as superior to all other forms of work. This is “not just about action to save jobs at a time when unemployment is continuing to rise steeply,” one green-leaning commentator has observed. “Rather it is about the necessity to save jobs which are critical to the wider good for society.”

In short, some jobs are worth defending — even if they are in the archaic wind-power industry — while other jobs (including those in more dynamic energy-production sectors) are not. Here, environmentalists are creating a new divide between “clean” workers and “dirty” workers, between those whose work they judge to be for “the wider good of society,” and those whose work they judge to be polluting, dangerous, and a threat to the future of the planet. Small numbers of eco-friendly workers are elevated as noble savages over the plain old savages of the “dirtier” industries.

As I am “Planet Gore’s favorite Marxist,” it won’t surprise you that I think the Vestas workers should keep their jobs — doubtless, I havent heard the last on that score — but I also think that dividing workers into clean-and-pure / dirty-and-evil camps on the basis of a hysterical perception of what is good and bad for the planet is possibly the worst way there is to defend jobs in a time of recession.