Clive Palmer sent the media into a frenzy when he stood alongside former US vice president Al Gore and announced he was a climate change convert at a bizarre press conference in Parliament’s Great Hall last night.

Did Palmer really outline a plan to save the planet? Well, not quite, as Crikey deputy editor Cathy Alexander explained last night.

As Alexander writes today, the mainstream media has portrayed this year’s strangest political coupling in two ways:

“One: Gore jetted into Canberra, convinced Palmer that climate change was real and caused by humans, so Palmer converted on the spot (cue Fairfax). The other version of events is that Palmer duped Gore into greenwashing his announcement, which actually amounts to an anti-environment hoax (cue The Australian).”

Neither is correct — and we have the backstory on how the meeting actually came about.

Meanwhile, Palmer’s theatrics worked. His announcement made front-page news on all major dailies except Melbourne’s Hun. But as Bernard Keane writes today, this stunt should be seen for what it is. Palmer is voting out a functional carbon pricing scheme, with nothing to replace it:

“Now he declares he’s a convert on climate science, but in fact will vote to dump the current carbon pricing regime, provided the government legislates a fig leaf to guarantee power prices will fall … Yesterday’s event was, in effect, another in the long list of examples of how Palmer is all headline and no story.”

And we’ll let Twitter have the last word …