STUDY: POWER PLANT POLLUTION CAUSES HEART ATTACKS

POWER PLANT POLLUTION cuts short nearly 24,000 lives, including 2,800 from lung cancer, and causes 38,200 heart attacks each year according to a new study on the environment from Clear the Air. The study found that each of those people whose lives were cut short because of power plant pollution lost an average of 14 years, dying earlier than they would have otherwise. Dirty Air, Dirty Power is based on an analysis by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's own air quality consultants using standard EPA methodology.

The report compares the premature deaths that would result under the Bush administration's air pollution plan, the existing Clean Air Act, and a proposal sponsored by Senator Jim Jeffords to strengthen the Clean Air Act. The Administration's proposal would allow 4,000 preventable premature deaths each year compared with simply enforcing current law, while repealing the very safeguards that could save those lives.

After writing about hope last month, I knew I was in for a real challenge. With Bush & Cheney spinning and flip-flopping, trying to distract people with wedge issues rather than addressing the real needs and hurts of the American people... well, it's been a rough month.

There've been a lot of others who have found it hard - some have even found it hard to believe that hope is worthwhile. Maybe those of us talking about hope should be a bit more clear.

There's a lot of bad stuff going down. We can't ignore it - at least, if we want to keep our country anything like it could or should be. We have to be able to address things that are wrong. But it's after we've identified the problems that it's time to be hopeful.

A good - but pessimistic - friend of mine often tells me: "It won't work. People won't go along with it." But stories like the one above prove him wrong. Re-read the last paragraph of the story again: To do better than the Bush administration's plan we'd have to just leave the existing law in place.

In one sense it's sad that "progress" would simply be going back to the way things were four years ago. But we've been there. We know we can do it. The slogans of "Another World Is Possible" aren't unrealistic when that possible world is one we had just four years ago.

Another world is possible - and we know we can do it.

We've done it before. And we can do it again.