Of course, it's not just coal that's let us down in the past. When the Longford natural-gas plant exploded in Victoria in 1998, the state was without gas for nearly two weeks. Ten years later, when a corroded gas pipe exploded on Western Australia's Varanus Island, the state lost about a third of its gas supply; the economic disruption lasted months.

Accidents happen, mistakes happen and, as the oil and gas industry knows, explosions that kill people and devastate whole states happen. But when a cyclone knocked over 20 electricity transmission towers and caused a state-wide blackout, the fossil fuel industry and Turnbull government mounted a full frontal attack on the "reliability" of renewable energy. And all of a sudden, we apparently needed to subsidise not just the enormous Adani coal mine but a new coal-fired power station in North Queensland as well. As the saying goes, never let a crisis go to waste.

Six months later, Malcolm Turnbull faced a new crisis. Two of the richest and most "innovative" men in the world, Elon Musk and Mike Cannon Brookes, were having a chat over Twitter about how new technology might provide world-leading energy storage solutions to augment South Australia's world-leading adoption of wind power.

Faced with a crisis of relevance, the Prime Minister performed yet another policy backflip and got so excited about the potential of energy storage to augment renewable energy that he proposed a multibillion-dollar plan to upgrade the Snowy Hydro.

The Australian energy market is so broken that we were recently taken by surprise by the closure of a 60-year-old steam engine. Hazelwood's closure has been an engineering inevitability for decades. Its owners estimated it needed a $750 million upgrade to make it safe to run. It wasn't renewable energy that killed Hazelwood, it was old age. But it seems even rust moves faster than the Australian Energy Market Commission.

This week, The Australia Institute published a public letter from 29 energy experts and academics urging the commission to modify the National Electricity Market rules to take account of new technologies. For decades, the rules have meant that those who supply electricity at peak times are not paid the "peak price" but a lower average price. The existing rules don't worry the coal-fired generators that can't ramp up their supply when the market needs it, but it's a big deal for batteries that can switch on the instant the market needs them. But despite the proposed "five-minute rule" sitting in the commission's inbox for years, there is no sign the rules will change in time to help prevent blackouts next summer.

While blaming your opponent for all ills and promising perfection if elected has become de rigueur in modern politics, it hasn't exactly delivered stable governments or stable electricity supplies. So if – and it's a big if – politicians want to prevent blackouts, provide affordable energy and get re-elected, they should perhaps plan for a secure future by learning from an insecure past.

Step 1: don't overpromise. Kevin Rudd promised to tackle the "great moral challenge" of climate change in his first term of office and gave up halfway through. Tony Abbott promised to solve everyone's problems by removing a small carbon tax. While climate change is an existential threat to our way of life, the social and economic consequences of addressing it are far smaller than the disruption of the GST, the mining boom or the invention of mobile phones.

Step 2: don't promise to give business certainty. Businesses face far bigger risks and uncertainties than those associated with a steadily rising carbon price and the steady roll-out of renewable energy. Interest rates, exchange rates, new competitors and changes in consumer preferences make capitalism an inherently risky business. Allowing the gas industry to export our gas has done far more to harm manufacturing than a carbon price ever would have. Like a bank jacking up interest rates, politicians must reserve the right to change policies when circumstances change.

Step 3: admit there's no silver bullet. While economists like to fantasise about "optimal policy", it's important for politicians to remember that we also fantasise about "optimal people". While our textbooks suggest if we "just get the carbon price right" everything else will take care of itself, reality suggests that such an approach is as ineffective from a policy point of view as it is disastrous from a political point of view. Taxing cigarettes has played a role in reducing smoking in Australia, but its success has come because it's part of a broad suite of policies that limits who can smoke, where you can smoke and the advertising of cigarettes, along with education campaigns aimed at shifting community norms.

Step 4: use actions, not just words, to take the community with you. People who grow some of their own food waste less food. While economists pretend that price is the main driver of behaviour, marketing professionals know that behaviour is the main driver of behaviour. Carbon pricing will play a role in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, but people who have installed efficient light bulbs, solar panels and batteries will be far more supportive of carbon prices than those who haven't.

Step 5: remember that details matter. While the public want to hear the big picture, the industry lobbyists will obsess about the details. If you overpromise, offer business certainty and pretend you have a silver bullet, it can be impossible to prevent the rats and mice from eating away at the whole project. And if the end result has too many loopholes, the public might think it's not worth the effort.

So, where to from here? If politicians accept the science of climate change, then they know we are 20 years too late to take our time. If we want fewer destructive storms, less drought and less sea-level rise, we need fewer coal mines, fewer coal-fired power stations and fewer cars on the road. Promising to reduce emissions by building "efficient new coal-fired power stations" makes as much sense as promising to lose weight by eating an extra tub of low-fat ice cream.

Old policy ideas like carbon taxes, emissions trading and renewable energy targets can, and probably will, play a major role in reducing emissions in the coming decades. And new policy ideas like emissions intensity schemes likely will as well. There is, for example, no reason that we can't have an emissions intensity scheme for the electricity sector, a carbon tax on the waste sector and mass-distance pricing for heavy vehicles. The fact is that charging trucks for the damage they do to our roads will collect far more revenue, and be far more popular, than a carbon tax on transport. Whether it's an emissions trading or emissions intensity scheme, no single policy will ever be effective enough, or popular enough, on its own.

But when designing climate and energy policy, politicians who want to drive rapid reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions need to spread their time carefully between making the destination clear, bringing people with them and designing the next step forward. And in designing the next step, they need to ensure that effort today makes it even easier to build another step tomorrow. That is what strategy is all about, and it's why we can't promise business "certainty". We don't know how many steps we are going to need to build because we don't know how high the sea is going to rise.

Richard Denniss is The Australia Institute's chief economist. Twitter: @RDNS_TAI