Liberal MP Craig Kelly's outrage was triggered on Friday when incoming National Australia Bank chairman Philip Chronican told a parliamentary inquiry that the bank would stop lending to new thermal coal mining customers and would wind down lending to existing customers to zero by 2035.

"How does it benefit the Australian economy if we have Australian banks refusing to loan to a sector that will be loaned to by foreign banks?," Mr Kelly asked.

Banks should make decisions based on commercial viability of businesses engaged in legal activity and not "put black lines through an entire industry to virtue signal", he said.

But bankers, by their very nature, tend to be conservative types not prone to irrational, emotional decisions. They live in a world of risk versus return. What Kelly has missed, when rushing to condemn NAB's stance, is that this is not an ideological decision, it's a hard-nosed financial one.

Like many other large businesses, NAB has simply run the numbers, calculated the risk and decided that thermal coal no longer adds up.

The bank is not alone in acting on climate change. In an interview also published during the week, the incoming chief executive of the nation's biggest mining company, BHP's Mike Henry, vowed to take a strong stance on climate change and emissions reductions, even if that brought it into conflict with the federal government.

He too has come under fire for talking up the merits of introducing a price on carbon. BHP has launched a $500m drive to reduce it's greenhouse gas emissions.

The government, or at least elements of it, appears to be driven by a belief that jobs in the mining sector must be protected at all costs.

Those jobs are important and will continue for some years to come. But the government is also failing to listen to businesses that are calling for change.

To be clear, coal still makes a massive contribution to the Australian economy and won't be going anywhere soon. It still accounts for around a quarter of the country's resource exports.

But even the Reserve Bank has warned there are risks of relying too heavily on the sector. "Demand will be shaped by the speed of the transition towards renewable energy sources, changing steel production technologies, and the pace of global economic growth", it has said.

There is also another elephant in the room. Professor Ross Garnaut, one of the country's most respected economists, has this month released a book arguing Australia could become a global super power in the energy sector if it embraces the opportunities from clean energy. Australia, says Garnaut, is well positioned to ride this wave, potentially surpassing the riches reaped during the last mining boom.

"Now the immediate costs of making the change are much lower, and it is clearer that Australia can prosper exceptionally in the post-carbon world."

Rather than attacking businesses trying to manage a difficult and complex change, perhaps it's time Coalition MPs focused more of their energies on making sure we don't squander the opportunities of the next energy boom.