Peta Credlin: The new gas-fired power station in the Hunter will keep prices down

The green-left agenda is not to cut emissions and protect the environment; it’s to damage the economy by forcing us back onto the intermittent power sources of yesteryear, writes Peta Credlin.

The best news to come out of Canberra last week was the announcement that the federal government will defy free market fundamentalism to build a new gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley to keep electricity prices down and the lights on.

Of course, free markets are normally the best way to get the best product for the best price. But green tinkering, including massive subsidies for unreliable renewable power, has meant the electricity market was corrupted years ago.

In the end, governments have a duty to maintain essential services; and, if that means intervening where markets have failed, so be it.

But while the government has been making a virtue of its pragmatism, the green-left has shown just how ideologically implacable it’s become.

Friday’s protests, by schoolchildren skipping school to cry that the climate change sky is falling in and lambaste the Prime Minister for his new gas deal, weren’t about reducing emissions because moving from coal to gas fired power will cut emissions by at least 30 per cent.

But given what now passes as education in schools, no one should be surprised when this simple arithmetic eludes them, or they fail to comprehend Australia’s total contribution of around 1.3 per cent of global emissions is dwarfed by China’s increases alone.

What’s increasingly obvious is that the green-left agenda is not to cut emissions and protect the environment; it’s to damage the economy by forcing us back onto the intermittent power sources of yesteryear that can’t keep a modern industrial economy going.

As the boss of the Tomago aluminium plant said, the largest battery in the country would keep it going for just 12 minutes. And that matters, because last Tuesday, Tomago was forced to halt production three times when the wholesale power prices surged 100 times their normal level, due to green energy market influences.

Those gluing themselves to the road in the name of saving the planet aren’t going to make the world cleaner. They’ll just make us poorer and China relatively richer as our heavy industry (and jobs) move offshore.

They think they’re on a moral crusade but they’re really just useful idiots for the dictators in Beijing.

WATCH PETA ON CREDLIN ON SKY NEWS, WEEKNIGHTS AT 6PM