For a former fully paid-up member of the Greenhouse Mafia, Ian “Chainsaw” Macfarlane has come a damn long way.  To see him admitting on 4 Corners last night that he had changed his views about the role of humans in climate change was semi-gobsmacking.  Here was one of the principal figures in the Howard Government’s efforts to deny, delay and derail action on climate change lamenting the difficulties of getting a deal on Labor’s CPRS through his own partyroom, at one stage declaring he wasn’t sure whether Penny Wong or his own party was the more difficult interlocutor on the issue.  Macfarlane’s trajectory goes even further than that of Andrew Robb, another former “sceptic” who threw himself into carbon trading issues when Malcolm Turnbull made him his point man on the ETS after becoming leader.

While Penny Wong came across as smug and Barnaby Joyce and the denialists barking mad, Macfarlane impressed as a genuine bloke trying his best given his party’s determination to implode over the issue.  And his point about carbon capture and storage – that it was unlikely to become viable for a couple of decades, if ever – is at this point the only sensible thing anyone outside the Greens has said on the issue.

All of which is unfortunate, because it’s fairly clear from last night’s program that, even if the Government was willing, there’ll be no deal on the CPRS because too many of Macfarlane’s colleagues have their heads in the sand, or perhaps somewhere closer to hand.

* Yup, lame, I know.