Bil McKibben writes that he, Jim Hansen, and others are looking to get arrested next week at a demonstration against coal. I wonder if McKibben has given much thought to the following passage that he wrote (emphasis added):

Coal provides 50 percent of our electricity. That juice comes from hundreds of expensive, enormous plants, each one of them owned by rich and powerful companies. Shutting these plants down — or getting the companies to install expensive equipment that might be able to separate carbon from the exhaust stream and sequester it safely in some mine somewhere — will be incredibly hard. Investors are planning on running those plants another half-century to make back their money — the sunk costs involved are probably on the scale of those lousy mortgages now bankrupting our economy.

And if you think it’s tough for us, imagine the Chinese. They’ve been opening a coal-burning power plant a week. You want to tell them to start shutting them down when that coal-fired power represents the easiest way to pull people out of poverty across Asia?

The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: Coal is bad. It’s bad when you mine it, it’s bad for the city where you burn it, and it’s bad for the climate.

McKibben writes that getting arrested has a possible downside:

It could turn people off, make them think that global warming protesters are crazy hippies harkening back to the ’60s.

I think that a more serious downside is that people might come to realize that the willingness to trade off pulling billions of people out of poverty for shutting down coal plants. Does McKibben really think that “investors” are the only stakeholders in coal plants? Coal is both bad and good, which makes the issue really difficult and the politics very complicated. Thus, we need policies that achieve both decarbonization and pull people out of poverty at the same time.