It was a very strange dinner in the member’s dining room of parliament house. Former US vice president Al Gore. Mining millionaire Clive Palmer. Former chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don Henry. Former chief of staff to Bob Brown and Christine Milne, Ben Oquist. Former adviser to retired independent MP Tony Windsor, John Clements. And Palmer United party senator-elect and former rugby league player Glenn Lazarus. And Gore and Palmer’s staff.

It provided some clues about how Palmer had come to make the even stranger, grand “I’m with Al Gore” climate policy announcement a few moments earlier.



Gore was in Australia to undertake his “climate reality” training program in Melbourne on Thursday. He is close to Henry. The others seem to have somehow become close to Palmer.



But at the end of the day what does Palmer’s announcement mean?



It appears to mean the carbon tax will be indeed be “axed”, but only if the government agrees to keep a kind of “frozen” emissions trading scheme to be re-activated some time in the future and also - and most importantly - if it agrees to give some kind of as-yet-unspecified assurances about lower household power bills.



Odds are Tony Abbott will be able to meet those conditions, although they remain so vague it’s kind of hard to be sure.



What if Clive wants absolute cuts to household power bills - as many voters may have believed were coming - rather than the lower-than-they-would-otherwise-be bills they are going to get under the current state price setting regimes and promises from the big energy retailers? What if he wants a “price setting” power for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission or a new power to reverse the onus of proof so that companies have to submit the price cuts that they make? That would be kind of hard for the government to deliver. But it would also be kind of hard for them to refuse, given how long and hard they have mounted the carbon tax is terrible for cost of living argument.



And agreeing to the continuation of any kind of emissions trading scheme would be some concession from Tony Abbott given that he has spent so long telling us that such laws are economy-strangling incarnations of evil.



And it means the thing stays there, lurking in the legislative shadows, ready to be renewed as soon as Abbott departs the political stage.

But let’s assume the tax is axed. What’s left?



Well, actually quite a lot more than we thought would be.



The $10bn Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the renewable energy target and the independent Climate Change Authority to start with.



But not Direct Action it would appear – which many experts might say is not an enormous loss, given how effective it is likely to be.



It is a dramatic, if slightly confusing, eleventh hour conversion to the climate change cause for Clive Palmer, millionaire would-be coal miner who has to pay millions in carbon tax for his Queensland nickel refinery and who just two months ago didn’t seem to think global warming was a thing.



After contributing to the downfall of three Australian prime ministers, two opposition leaders and seven years of bitter and acrimonious debate, carbon policy is now presenting yet another prime minister with some serious dilemmas.

