Remember the Sydney Declaration on Climate Change? No? Neither does anyone else.

John Howard trumpeted it as the most significant outcome of the APEC meeting he hosted in Sydney in 2007.

That meeting was remembered for many things. There was the civil uprising over the security wall erected around the Sydney CBD; the Chaser boys making a mockery of that security cordon by waltzing through, one dressed as Osama bin Laden; Kevin Rudd cracking hardy in fluent Mandarin with then-Chinese leader Hu Jintao, sending Alexander Downer into conniptions; and Downer then confronting Howard with the unwelcome news that he had lost the majority support of his cabinet.

All of them were significant events in their own rights. But the Sydney Declaration? Nup.

Howard and his chief bureaucrat, the affable Peter Shergold, designed the declaration to partner their version of an emissions trading scheme in the forlorn hope of establishing some last-minute credibility on climate and avoiding Kevin-ageddon at the 2007 election. It failed. Spectacularly.

Now, 12 years later, Scott Morrison is cobbling together a similarly unconvincing suite of measures, the Climate Solutions Package, largely for the same reason.

It, too, is likely to fail. Voters just don’t believe the Coalition is “fair dinkum” on climate change, to employ the Prime Minister’s favourite expression.

And why should they? After toying with an emissions intensity scheme, then a clean energy target, they spent the best part of 18 months working up the NEG, only to punt it and its leader, Malcolm Turnbull.

That left Morrison as a Prime Minister effectively without an energy or climate policy. That was unsustainable, particularly after the angry messages on climate inaction from the voters of Batman, Wentworth and the State of Victoria.

His solution? A bit of this and a bit of that. On Monday, he revived Tony Abbott’s Emissions Reduction Fund and on Tuesday he brought Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0 dream to life with a $1.4 billion commitment.

By bridging the policies of his two immediate predecessors, he was trying to appease the competing demands of conservatives and moderates in his party room.

But he didn’t. The moderates still want him to do more on reducing emissions and the conservatives were straight on the phone the moment the Snowy Hydro announcement was made, briefing journalists that the money now invested in the scheme was enough to build six new coal-fired power stations.

Morrison’s instincts this week, though, were correct. Voters expect him to protect the fossil fuel industry after his show and tell with that lump of coal in the Parliament. Labor now call it his pet rock.

So, it was politically smart of him to make his first two announcements at large-scale renewable operations — Snowy Hydro and Tasmania’s Marinus project, transmitting hydro-electricity in Victoria.

Strewth! The optics of the events were good. So was the broad strategy in spending an entire week talking climate change and energy. The phonics? Not so much.

He declared they were both producing “fair dinkum” power. There’s that expression again. And not just once: “Absolutely fair dinkum power! It doesn’t get more fair dinkum than this! This is fair dinkum! One hundred per cent!”

Strewth! The optics of the events were good. So was the broad strategy in spending an entire week talking climate change and energy. The phonics? Not so much.

But it is the detail that presents the biggest problem. About two-thirds of the $2 billion being poured into the Emissions Reduction Fund will go towards carbon farming projects, such as large-scale tree plantings, carbon-storing soils and biochar, improving fire management programs and biofuels for farming equipment.

The mass abatement program is designed to help us meet our Paris target of reducing 2005-level emissions by 26 per cent, or almost 700 million tonnes of carbon.

Morrison maintains that we will satisfy this target “in a canter”. And climate advocates now believe they know why he’s so confident. The Government plans to use its carbon credits left over from the Kyoto process to count against its Paris commitments, effectively cutting that target in half to just over 12 per cent.

And if that happens, as appears likely, we will meet our Paris undertaking without doing much at all. Technological advances, alone, will get us there.

Meanwhile, land clearing rates will continue to rise, despite the Sydney Declaration’s bold target of increasing forest coverage in the Asia-Pacific by 20 million hectares by 2020. Instead, the forests continue to disappear and along with them the voters’ faith in political declarations made on climate change in Sydney, the Snowy Mountains, Tasmania or, indeed, anywhere.

Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s Political Editor. He is the 2018 Walkley Award winner for commentary writing.