Right now, Malcolm Turnbull is giving his best impression of a poker player about to table a royal flush, but this week’s Essential Report suggests that he’s actually playing a losing hand when it comes to energy policy.

It says much about the game the prime minister’s been playing over recent months that he appears to be overjoyed with the cards he’s picked up after throwing in the clean energy target. Or maybe that’s just his poker face.

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Everyone knows he was ready to sit on the CET, but he and his energy minister Josh Frydenberg bowed to pressure from their backers – both political and financial.

Turnbull is certainly talking up his hand – lower prices, energy stability, lower emissions, all without the “the need for an actual emissions reduction policy! He’s giving his best bluff, hoping the public buys it if the lights go out over summer.

But in politics, as in poker, a hand’s strength is relative to those held by one’s opponents.

Bill Shorten’s playing the long game, sitting pat with a hand that the public has already endorsed, no need to go for the jackpot this hand and willing to deal down if required, but also increasingly in a position to bid up.

There’s Tony Abbott, toting his own weapon of mass distraction – a sacrificial goat no less – determined to table a hand of jokers, refusing to accept that you need actual cards that are recognised by the table before you get access to the kitty.

The business community is at the table too, although they seem ready to walk away altogether if the banker keeps dealing up this sort of rubbish. That’s apart from the Coal Club, desperately looking for a match for their ace of spades.

As for the rest of us? Well we don’t get dealt into this game, we just have to clean up the mess when the bank is broken and the players say goodnight to reconvene the next time to do it all again.

So why is Turnbull playing a losing hand?

First, thanks to the advocacy of his chief scientist, who he commissioned to write his report on breaking through the energy minefield, the public is ready for a clean energy target.

Changing the name, changing the structure, changing the focus, doesn’t just walk away from the mechanism, it also walks away from public expectation.

The interesting point here is the only voter group who doesn’t overwhelmingly approve of the CET are the rightwing “Others” who gravitate around One Nation and the Australian Conservatives. But even here they are more in favour than against.

The second reason why Turnbull is playing a losing hand is that the public is actually supportive of renewables: as a power source, as an industry and pointedly in a forced choice with coal.

Again, three-quarters of Coalition voters want renewable subsidies and want no truck with the rubbish Abbott is sprouting. For every Coalition voter who stands with Abbott in opposition to incentives for the development of renewable energy production, six support continued incentives.

The third reason Turnbull is playing a losing hand is that the public are on board with Labor’s target of 50% renewables by 2030. Again, even a majority of Coalition voters support a policy explicitly framed as Labor.

The fourth reason the prime minister is playing a losing hand is that the government’s action on energy policy is being seen as insufficient.

Despite wagging his finger wagging at energy CEOs, the well-timed release of the ACCC’s preliminary report and his “we’re making your energy more affordable” advertising campaign, people know in their bones the government is just not doing enough:

In the four years since the Coalition came to power, prices have continued to head north and have doubled for some customers. The system has become less resilient as ageing generators have left the field without replacement, and our power emissions have resumed rising.

It’s no surprise that a government that has caused a supply shortage through policy uncertainty, and presided over a market where energy companies extract maximum profits, spends all its time blaming everyone else.

Abbott showed how an opposition can create an energy panic. But the reality of ensuring balance in Australia’s energy systems and markets is a little harder when you are in control of the nation. Or not.

But there’s something more fundamental going on that ensures Turnbull is playing a losing hand – something that goes even more to his core than his seemingly shelved determination to address climate change.

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In standing in the way of renewables, Turnbull is standing in the way of the technological progress and innovation he championed in the lead up to the last federal election.

That’s been the most interesting dynamic of the energy debate – it is human ingenuity through the rapid development of battery technology that poses the biggest threat to the fossil fuel industry.

People who will never march to save the planet get this; they recognise human development when they see it and they instinctively recognise the energy transition as being as much a challenge of technology as of politics.

A prime minister standing in the way of that sort of development is not just holding a dud hand, he’s actually slowing up the game for all of us.