Australian conservatives have finally lost the climate change wars. But what has their fight cost us?

From around 2010 to 2015, Andrew Bolt claimed there had been "no warming since 2008". He had to stop using this patently fallacious argument when the local maximum of 2015 beat the local maximum from 2008. Now he grudgingly admits there has been warming.

Across the RW media space, there is very little talk of global warming (or even man-made global warming) not existing anymore. Now, as any numpty can see the temperature rising at a rapid clip on a graph, the RW talking points have fallen back to safer ground of renewables being crap or Australia having little impact anyway.

Now we see Liberals accepting net zero (as a slogan at least), Murdoch directing his media property lieutenants to accept that climate change exists, Teals smashing Liberals anyway, and now even the Nationals have elected a leader who also accepted net zero (again, probably more as a slogan than effectual policy, but its a start).

15 years after Liberal Senator Nick Minchin cynically imported toxic Right-wing climate denialist talking points from his study tours in the US, it seems his party, along with the bulk of conservatives in Australia, have finally given up their denial of an obvious scientific fact.

However in that time, they have poisoned the well against the most obvious and economically effective tool to curb emissions - a carbon tax. Instead we've had years of boondoggles and picking winners from the Coalition, which has meant shovelling taxpayer money at dubious carbon capture projects run by LNP donors, along with paying farmers not to cut down trees they had no intention of cutting down anyway. The Coalition really worked out how to make "climate change" work for them and their mates, and no small cost to us the taxpayer.

How long before we can get back to the basic policy response to emissions reduction - a carbon tax? And will the Murdoch media and the Coalition throw a sht-fit and attempt to make political hay out of it again? Or will they accept that history has moved on and they're on the wrong side of it?

Yes we're a small player in an almost intractable global problem, but it's still frustrating how slowly and stupidly the policy "debate" (which is really two sides talking past each other until one side pipes down) has progressed in this country.