The ascension of Malcolm Turnbull and the existence of the new Paris climate agreement raises a fascinating question: which political entity now speaks for the climate sceptics? Watch this space, because it won't be empty for long, writes Annabel Crabb.

With its customarily exhilarating sense of possibility, the Australian climate policy chocolate wheel has spun again in the last fortnight and tick-tick-ticked to a halt with the needle pointing shakily to: We're back on.

We've tried so many variations over the years.

We've had a conservative government that came home from Kyoto in 1997 ululating with delight over a climate deal that gave Australia much latitude, to be criticised at home by the Labor Party for not going hard enough. That was John Howard's government, from 1997 to about the turn of the century.

Then we had a conservative government that insisted it would honour its Kyoto commitments while quietly crab-walking away from the deal itself, refusing to ratify it, and maintaining that the "jury was still out" on global warming. That was Howard from 2001 to about 2006.

Then we had a conservative government that still wouldn't ratify Kyoto but did decide that Australia should have an emissions trading scheme, and campaigned accordingly in 2007, only to have drought-parched, seriously rattled constituents desert it in droves for Kevin Rudd, who looked like fresh legs and was less personally plagued by serial inconsistency on the issue plus spoke Chinese, which seemed nebulously useful at the time.

And there began the period in which this country got closest to actual consensus, with a Coalition cautiously engaged - first vaguely under Brendan Nelson and then more concertedly under Malcolm Turnbull - in taking Howard's proposed emissions trading scheme, and Rudd's proposed emissions trading scheme, and seeing if there was any way for those two things to play nicely together.

For a while, it seemed there was. And in fact, Turnbull and his lead negotiator Ian Macfarlane (yep, the same dude who's just put a giant bat up Turnbull's nightie by defecting to the Nationals) actually reached a handshake deal with Rudd and Penny Wong, and were all set to formalise the union when Nick Minchin, Tony Abbott, Cory Bernardi swept in - caped avengers for the Australian fossil fuel economy - and put an end to it by taking Turnbull out. By one vote.

(Really, one of the most extraordinary aspects of this potted history is the extent to which, at several turns, the story could have gone either way. It's like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, where you end up either in a pot of boiling oil or in a magical land where it's always your birthday).

So that was in 2009 - six years ago now. And what we've had since is quite a simple binary system; Labor and the Greens running an activist climate change agenda and trying to put a price on carbon emissions, and the Coalition running a conservative, pro-industry approach with a resonant hip-pocket appeal to voters, who were encouraged to resist a "great big new tax".

Whoever the Labor leader was - whether it was Rudd waxing and waning between "it's the greatest moral challenge of our generation" and "perhaps we'll put it off for now" or Julia Gillard pinging back and forth between "Let's have a community council about it" and "I'm doing this if it kills me and it probably will", the essential dynamic has been the same: Labor siding with supporters of climate change action, the Coalition siding with a spectrum of opinion ranging from outright sceptics to geopolitical pragmatists.

Even the return of Turnbull to the leadership of the Coalition did not immediately change this dynamic, given his decision to retain Abbott's climate policy settings, in the political equivalent of the new husband who goes about the house clad in the pyjamas of his predecessor so as not to startle the children.

But the existence of a global agreement - however flawed - will change it, for sure.

Consider the political landscape in Australia now.

Turnbull, the new and perpetually excited Prime Minister, still surfing along on a wave of largely unearned adulation on account of Not Being The Last Guy (this happens to all new PMs to a certain extent) now has an international agreement on climate which includes all sorts of opportunities to extend Australian ambitions in this field. He has also taken care to establish himself as a man of the future whose every third word is "innovation". All of these arrows are pointing in the same direction. They signify a man who - to continue with the earlier analogy - is going to change his pyjamas after a respectful period has elapsed.

The fascinating question this raises is: Who speaks for climate sceptics and hip-pocket-protectors in this environment? All the political pressure from Labor and the Greens will be from the other side; that Turnbull isn't going far enough on climate.

This is a yawning vacuum that will be filled, because we know from experience that nature abhors one.

But by whom? Not by Clive Palmer, whose protest votes caused all sorts of disruptions at the last election. We still have photos, remember, of him standing next to Al Gore and declaring himself the saviour of the planet. (While planning a gargantuan coal mine, yes, your memory does serve you correctly).

The outcome at Paris creates all sorts of opportunities; for business and innovation, and everything that the exhausted signatories to the deal have been spruiking for days.

But the events of recent weeks also create a huge political opportunity in Australia, made even more inviting by the prospect of a federal government campaigning to increase the Goods and Services Tax.

That opportunity will be taken up either by a breakaway group within the Coalition, or by a new political entity entirely. Watch that space, because it won't be empty for long.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. She tweets at @annabelcrabb.