The energy deal, announced last week, includes a commitment from NSW to "find" 70PJ of gas to contribute to the east coast market.

This is a figure mysteriously similar to the volume Santos says it will drag out of the aquifers below the Pilliga Forest, risking drought-affected farms and allowing Santos to drain 37 billion litres of groundwater.

I am shocked by this announcement in the wake of the nation's catastrophic summer of bushfires, which was brought back to front of mind on Sunday with Newcastle again blanketed in hazardous smoke.

This season has seen the loss of more than one billion native animals and six million hectares of some of the most biodiverse forests in the world.

It is now more important than ever to protect irreplaceable life-giving forests such as the Pilliga, which is the largest koala habitat west of the Great Dividing Range.

Communities in the north west of the state, the Hunter and here in Newcastle have been fighting this project for close to a decade and will continue to do so.

The protection of our natural world from fossil fuel extraction and from the impacts of climate change has never been more critical.

I felt the reality of the crisis while trapped at Bega evacuation centre over new year's, welcoming in the new decade under a cloud of orange ash.

With Friday's announcement, Scott Morrison is throwing regional communities under a bus at a time when they need to be supported through drought and bushfires.

I certainly won't, and neither will the rest of Australia, stand for farming communities being hijacked by dirty and thirsty gas mining that degrades farmland, groundwater and air quality.

Communities in the bush are already suffering, especially from severe drought in the north west.

In December, I visited my grandmother in Narrabri, a place dear to my heart. But the strong dust storms made trips outside unbearable.

Santos, is proposing to drill 850 coal seam gas wells in eastern Australia's largest inland forest, the Pilliga, and surrounding farmland.

The Pilliga forest provides critical koala habitat, which is invaluable now that huge swathes have been decimated in bushfires along the east coast since September.

We've all seen the heartbreaking pictures of the injured and maimed koalas in newspapers and social media.

Alarmingly, Santos recently refused to respond to issues raised by the RFS in regards to increased bushfire risk from gas flaring in the Pilliga.

Let's not believe the fossil-fuel industry-led spin that gas is a clean-burning transition fuel in the fight against climate change.

The reality is, it's up there with the worst contributors.

Scott Morrison can try to reinforce this fallacy, but there's no room in our carbon budget for new gas development.

For a safe liveable climate, we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Gas is no exception.

For clean air, clean water and my future, I want to see the Narrabri Gas Project halted and gas off the table as a transition fuel.

This will bring us closer to the clean and abundant energy future all Australians deserve.

At 95,000 hectares, Santos' project is the largest, by land area, ever proposed in NSW. It would be 38 times the size of the City of Sydney.

The project is years behind schedule. It is also highly controversial and unpopular, generating a record-breaking 22,700 formal objections.

Our love affair with coal, oil and gas fueling dangerous climate change, which leads to more severe weather events, is completely objectionable.

We can't ignore that link, not now that bushfires continue to devastate our cherished continent.

We're not keeping our heads in the sand any longer. We're keeping fossil fuels in the ground, starting with Pilliga coal seam gas.