“But if they do this on net zero, they’ll never get elected” is one of the most common comments in response to having the situation explained to them.

This is the correct response, because the Liberals can’t get elected if they do this.

As much as some may look to Tim Wilson’s defeat of Zoe Daniels in Goldstein as proof they can manage to win back the teals (as James Paterson did on Wednesday), they forget that is when the Liberals had a net zero policy at least partly based in the science – and Goldstein was a perfect storm of circumstances unlikely to ever be repeated.

(Also, the best way to remind people of why they voted in independent in the first place is to have someone like Wilson back on the political scene.)

The thing to understand with all of this is that it is not logical and it never has been. This is about individual power and survival.

Barnaby Joyce was all but crowing from the parliament flag pole this week at how he had dragged the Nationals, once again, to his position, which has then had the Liberals all but follow suit.

The Nationals have been openly dragging the Liberals around since the Turnbull years. Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton were canny enough to manage to contain the damage (and were also mostly on board). Ley has no such authority.

That she will most likely fold on net zero to save her own leadership skin for a few more months is the inevitable end point of all of this.

Ley gets called a moderate, but that is only because she is moderate in comparison to Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie. She isn’t and never has been a moderate – she has been whatever best serves her individual advancement in the party.

It doesn’t matter whether or not she personally believes net zero must be achieved by 2050 for the climate to have a chance (and this is the bare minimum and so far we haven’t even been able to do that). The only thing she really believes in is her own personal survival.

That has led to this position where Ley doesn’t have a single principle to fall back on. She can’t say to anyone in the Liberal party room that they always knew where she stood on this issue, as she’s never held a principled position for longer than it served her in that moment.

Now, if she tells the growing number of her party room who want net zero gone that she’s telling the Nats to go jump, she will be seen as weak, and gone. And if she tells what’s left of the moderates that she’s going to try to hold the Coalition together for a little bit longer and capitulate to the Nats with this pretend “sometime in the second half of the century” furphy, and potentially cost more of them their seats, she’ll be seen as weak. And she’s gone.

Because the only thing that has been consistent in all of this, is Ley’s weakness.

It doesn’t matter that none of this makes sense. This is the path the Coalition has been on since John Howard let all the crazies loose with his refusal to ratify the Kyoto Treaty, which was just a continuation of Keating’s “no regrets” policy.

The Coalition has used climate as a personal weapon for advancement for the past 30 years and even its demise won’t be enough to stop individual MPs using it for their own political future, the country be damned.

It is policy dictated by the blaggards at Sky After Dark, who will continue to make elected representatives kiss their rings in return for a direct line to the party “base”, which has been well out of step with Australia for the past decade, but is too blinded by (their own) identity politics to see it.

So no, it doesn’t make sense. That’s not the issue. It never has made sense. That the Liberals will go further down a path that has punished them for the past two elections doesn’t matter to them.

A few individuals will benefit for the first time in their own patch and their own leadership ambitions, and that’s always been the point.

The Nationals are further down this path because they made the decision three decades ago that the only way to beat One Nation in their electorates was to become it. The Liberals are losing for the same reason – they can’t defend themselves against independent or Green challengers in their seats because they are helping Nationals MPs starve off One Nation challengers in theirs.

The two have never been compatible. This has always been how this was going to end.

When Ley is pushed off, and she will be, it won’t be any different for the next leader. That won’t be rational either. For this to make sense you have to understand what it’s really about – winning personal ideological fights. Not elections.