All three facts came together seamlessly this week as New South Wales headed towards its state election on Saturday.

In one of the most astonishing examples of trying to manufacture the truth by saying something often, the NSW Greens claimed that closing the state’s seven coal-fired power stations would cut power bills and create jobs.

Perhaps even more astonishing than the claim itself was that some media outlets simply reported what was said without asking a critical question: how?

Hogsback does not plan to attack his colleagues in other media outlets but it was staggering that the Greens were able to make the claims they did and no one seems to have tested the questions of costs, both capital and operating, who pays and how much they pay.

All that the voters of NSW were told is that “large amounts” of money would be needed to make this miracle happen.

Sorry, but that has to be the most outrageous comment yet made in the campaign against coal and the attempt to change the way the world works because of a political belief that comes straight from Vlad Lenin’s 1917 handbook titled, How to Fool Most of the People Most of the Time.

Well, the co-founder of Russia’s communist party never actually wrote a book with that title but since one side of this argument is stretching the truth, why can’t Hogsback?

What’s needed in this game of misinformation is someone who can look at a claim and dig into the detail to see if it has a kernel of truth, which is what ought to have been done with the Green comments about shutting coal-fired power stations and cutting power bills – in exchange for “a large amount” of money.

The only detail in the Green policy was a claim that 73,000 jobs would be created for people working in the wind, solar, biological and geothermal power industries, and that 1000 coal-station jobs would be lost. Cuts to emissions would include the elimination of 63 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide.

The alternative to this policy plucked from cloud nine was that to do nothing would see power bills soar.

Not said was that any increase in power bills from the do-nothing option would largely be caused by the introduction of the proposed government carbon tax, whereas a genuine do-nothing option without a carbon tax would see no more than the steady rise in power bills that have been a fact of life for decades.

But the biggest holes in this latest attack on coal are the ones the critics simply cannot answer. The following questions must be put to them repeatedly or else they will get away with the Lenin approach to truth management:

• Do any alternative sources of power generation provide sufficient electricity to meet the demands of industrial consumers, apart from nuclear?
• Do all (or any) of the proposed alternative power systems actually work as promised?
• What is the capital cost of building wind farms and other alternative energy systems and where will they be located?
• What are the operating costs of the alternatives?

These are questions which the Greens shy away from because they know that the answers are so damaging to their cause, and expose the lie behind what they’re claiming.

The truth is that no alternative power systems can meet industrial demand, which means that a wholesale closure of coal power stations and a switch to other sources would see the end of large-scale manufacturing in NSW.

But before getting that far, there is the unavoidable fact that none of the alternatives actually work as promised and if they did, they would cost much more than coal power.

All we know is that “large amounts” of capital would be required (without saying who provides it) and no estimate is provided on what it would do to household power bills (skyrocket is the answer to that one).

Why coal has to cop this sort of nonsense is a mystery, but at some point the Greens must be asked for the detail of what they’re proposing and who pays.