The split in the Climate Change Authority is a rerun of the climate policy fight Australia has been having for the past 10 years – the clash between what is undeniably necessary and what is politically possible.

The CCA report, to be released on Wednesday, lands exactly on the spot where the major parties might, just might, be able to reach a compromise and finally end the barren years of climate policy “war”, policy reversal and time-wasting gridlock.

Guardian Australia understands the report recommends a type of emissions trading scheme for the electricity sector where generators are penalised for polluting above an emissions-intensity baseline.

It’s the policy Labor took to the last election and exactly what most observers assumed the Coalition’s Direct Action would morph into after next year’s review shows what everyone already knows, that it isn’t fit for purpose in its current form.

The CCA is also understood to recommend a strengthening of the current “safeguards mechanism” for other big polluters.

The dissenters argue the authority is supposed to make recommendations based on what is scientifically necessary and leave it up to the politicians to make the political compromises – and that the recommended policy cannot meet the increasingly ambitious greenhouse gas reductions that Australia agreed to in Paris last year.

They are probably right.

But over the past decade the undeniably necessary task of doing our part to avert global warming has become ever-bigger and the politically-possible solutions seem to have shrivelled. We’ve actually done very little.

The new energy and environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, started out in his new job saying Direct Action needed no change at all because it was “very successful”. An authority report pushing for change – backed by board members mostly appointed by the Coalition – could help make the case that that starting point was never tenable.

The last time a politically possible policy was defeated because it wouldn’t achieve the scientifically-necessary greenhouse gas cuts was when the parliament voted down Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. And that started the long and sorry story that led us here.