Josh Frydenberg says he’s disappointed the energy policy he spent months formulating is now dead, and he says the Coalition’s message at the next federal election will be that both the major parties have failed to land durable policies to reduce emissions.

The treasurer told the ABC on Sunday “no one is more disappointed than I am” about the government dumping the national energy guarantee, which Scott Morrison confirmed remained the official government position over the weekend.

Frydenberg, who as energy and environment minister spearheaded the Neg, said “a lot of work went into the national energy guarantee” but he had to recognise the reality that colleagues refused to support it.

“As Bismarck said: politics is the art of the possible. It was very clear that that legislation couldn’t proceed so our focus now turns to the reliability aspect of the national energy guarantee, which is very much needed,” Frydenberg said.

The treasurer said the government was now focused solely on ensuring the electricity system was reliable, and that power bills came down. The new energy minister Angus Taylor is currently working up options for cabinet consideration.

Pressed on whether it was politically possible for the Coalition to go to the next federal election with no policy to reduce emissions, Frydenberg pointed to the emissions reduction fund, which was not topped up by the government in the last budget, and the renewable energy target, which winds down after 2020.

He claimed the government had “a suite of measures that take into account the built environment, that take into account the land sector, that take into account the electricity sector” – even though the government has now formally abandoned its 26% emissions reduction target in the electricity sector.

The Energy Security Board says emissions will be 24% lower by 2021 courtesy of a big build of renewable energy pulled through by the renewable energy target, a development which is also contributing to lower wholesale prices, but electricity will not reach a 26% reduction in the absence of the Neg.

Even if the the ESB projections are wrong, and the electricity sector managed to reduce emissions by 26% with no policy to drive that result, the Paris target Australia has signed up to applies across the economy, not just to the electricity sector, and the government’s own data shows emissions in other sectors of the economy are rising.

As well as calculating the electricity sector would not meet its pro-rata Paris target in the absence of the Neg, the ESB also issued a public warning in August that delaying agreement on the policy will “prolong the current investment uncertainty, and deny customers more affordable energy”.

Scott Morrison has declared repeatedly that Australia will meet its Paris commitments “at a canter” but there is no evidence to support that claim.

Frydenberg said on Sunday that no one in politics could afford to point fingers when it came to climate policy. “This is a challenge that has dogged both sides of politics,” he said.

“Who could forget Kevin Rudd saying it is the greatest moral challenge of our time and then Julia Gillard in the same electoral cycle saying there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead?”

Labor is yet to decide whether it will persist with the Neg for the electricity sector with an emissions reduction target of 45%, or whether it will take a different policy to the next federal election.

Butler said the government had not only ditched the Neg, it had ditched any attempt to reach a bipartisan consensus with Labor, ending a partisan war that stakeholders across the divide want settled.

“That is really the gravity of what the government has done here,” Butler told Sky News on Sunday morning.

“It is not just the particular model of the national energy guarantee, they have decided to walk away from any attempt to agree with Labor on a bipartisan investment framework.”