Liberal leader Sussan Ley ended her climate policy press conference on Thursday afternoon with an appropriately Trumpian flourish.

She’d been asked how she could at once declare that her party would dump emissions reduction targets, abandon all the mechanisms in place to lower emissions, pump public money into coal power and yet insist a government she led would not abandon the Paris climate treaty.

“This is a plan to bring down emissions and to provide affordable energy,” she said. “And if there are reasons why people in Paris or in some United Nations organisation don’t like it, I can deal with that.”

Dan Tehan, her energy and emission spokesman, was pleased. “Well said,” he muttered.

The exchange captured the moment nicely and was Trump-like in its dismissiveness and ignorance. The Coalition’s abandonment of credible climate policy has far more to do with virtue-signalling to the sceptical right than it does with climate science or economics. Beating up on the citizens of Paris and the staff of an unnamed UN outfit fits nicely into that rubric.

Minutes later, Nationals leader David Littleproud fronted cameras to congratulate Ley on her “maturity and leadership” in following the course charted for him weeks earlier by climate policy sceptics on his own right flank, namely Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce.

Asked how these seemingly incompatible positions – dumping Paris targets while maintaining support for the Paris Agreement – might be juggled, Ley had an answer that might come back to haunt her.

While Liberals would not strive for net zero, she explained, if Australia somehow reached that state without effort, it would be a “welcome outcome”.

Given the diabolical impacts that scientists predict, should the world fail to balance carbon emissions with the planet’s ability to absorb them by mid-century, Climate Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie said she found Ley’s choice of words jarring.

It was a moment, she said, that reminded her of Scott Morrison fondling coal in parliament, or of the time Coalition ministers embraced to celebrate the abolition of the carbon tax. “People will look back on this moment and shiver,” said McKenzie.

Throughout the day, Coalition leaders and MPs insisted that their goal was not to undermine climate action, but to cut energy prices, which they say the Labor government has forced up by supporting a transition to renewables.

This is a position both Coalition parties are wedded to, though their evidence is thin at best.

During his 15-minute press conference, Littleproud claimed 13 times that Labor’s net zero goal would cost the nation $9 trillion by 2050. This is false, as Littleproud knows, or at the very least, should know.

It is a figure extracted from a study published by Net Zero Australia, a project born of a partnership between the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland and Princeton University. When the $9 trillion figure segued into the policy debate this month, the partnership put out a statement saying it had been misrepresented. Rather, it said, the cost was around $300 billion.

Similarly, Australian energy experts have been battling for months to be heard through political sloganeering about the key drivers of increasing energy prices in Australia.

As Tony Wood, energy and climate change senior fellow at the Grattan Institute, explained in July, energy prices surged in the first years of the 2020s because Australia’s clapped-out fleet of coal-fired power stations kept on failing.

In central Queensland, a unit of the Callide power station blew up in May 2021, causing an immediate loss of power to half a million people and prolonged shortages across the east coast. In June, flooding in the Latrobe Valley meant power production was cut at the Yallourn power station, causing more long-term east coast shortages. The nearby Hazelwood plant had closed a few years earlier after a fire.

Whatever the true cause of the rising cost of energy in Australia, it is now clear the Coalition is determined to pin the blame on renewable energy at the expense of its own climate policy.

We are all poorer for it.

Labor might have a better record than the Coalition on climate, but it is not one it should be boasting about. Its climate targets do not align with a pathway to net zero. While it has policies in place to drive down domestic emissions, Australia remains the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels, and Labor’s support for industry remains ironclad.

The government might be moved to do more if Ley did as she said and went about presenting “serious, credible, compelling policy alternatives”.

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