It was the weirdest joint presentation of 2014. Clive Palmer, the mining billionaire behind the Titanic II, and US climate change evangelist, Al Gore, announced on Wednesday night that Palmer would side with the Abbott government to rewind the carbon tax, so long as the essential legislation was kept in place.Standing next to Gore, Palmer told reporters he’d use his balance of power in the senate to reprice carbon at zero, instead of removing the tax entirely, in the hope that one day it could be revived. On top of that, he demanded that 20 percent of our power continues to be renewable by 2020.Al Gore is well known for his call-to-arms documentary An Inconvenient Truth, but rarely for endorsing coal miners, so we were keen to ask him some questions. We caught up at his Climate Reality Project conference in Melbourne to talk about deal brokering, feeling optimistic, and his message for Tony Abbott.