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Six years following Donald Trump allegedly wrote a suggestive birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the current American leader put his name to something that now appears equally surprising: a document calling for measures on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, the businessman, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a coalition of business leaders behind a large ad urging laws to “control global warming, an urgent issue facing the United States and the planet today”. The US must take the forefront on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible consequences for mankind and our planet”.

Today, the letter is jarring. The world continues to dawdle politically in its reaction to the environmental emergency but renewable power is expanding, accounting for nearly every new energy capacity and drawing twice the funding of traditional energy globally. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has changed.

Most starkly, though, the president has become the world's leading proponent of fossil fuels, directing the power of the American leadership into a rearguard battle to maintain the world mired in the era of burning fossil fuels. There is now no stronger individual adversary to the unified attempt to prevent climate breakdown than the current administration.

When world leaders convene for UN climate talks in the coming weeks, the escalation of Trump's opposition towards environmental measures will be apparent. The US state department's office that handles environmental talks has been eliminated as “redundant”, making it uncertain who, should any attend, will represent the world's leading economic and military global power in Belem.

As in his first term, the administration has again pulled out the US from the international environmental agreement, opened up more land and waters for fossil fuel extraction, and begun dismantling pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths across America. These reversals will “drive a stake through the heart of the environmental movement”, as Lee Zeldin, the president's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, enthusiastically put it.

But the administration's latest spell in the executive branch has progressed beyond, to extremes that have astonished many observers.

Rather than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his political race, the president has begun obliterating renewable initiatives: halting ocean-based turbines that had already been approved, prohibiting wind and solar from federal land, and removing financial support for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while handing new public funds to a apparently hopeless attempt to restore coal).

“We're definitely in a different environment than we were in the first Trump administration,” said a former climate negotiator, who was the lead environmental diplomat for the US during Trump's initial administration.

“The emphasis on dismantlement rather than construction. It's difficult to witness. We're not present for a significant worldwide concern and are ceding that ground to our competitors, which is not good for the United States.”

Not content with jettisoning Republican economic principles in the US energy market, Trump has attempted involvement in foreign nations' climate policies, scolding the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not extracting enough oil for his preference. He has also pushed the EU to agree to buy $750bn in US oil and gas over the next three years, as well as striking fossil fuel deals with the Asian nation and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” the president told unresponsive leaders during a UN speech last month. “Unless you distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your nation is going to decline. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

The president has attempted to reshape language around power and environment, too. Trump, who was seemingly radicalised by his aversion at viewing renewable generators from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “repulsive” and “pathetic”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.

His administration has eliminated or concealed inconvenient climate research, deleted references of global warming from official sites and produced an error-strewn study in their place and even, despite the president's supposed support for free speech, drawn up a inventory of banned terms, such as “carbon reduction”, “sustainable”, “pollutants” and “green”. The mere reporting of carbon output is now verboten, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I've established a small directive in the executive mansion,” the president confided to the UN. “Never use the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

All of this has hindered the adoption of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, spooked companies closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean energy projects, costing more than sixteen thousand positions, primarily in Republican-held districts.

Power costs are increasing for US citizens as a consequence; and the US's planet-heating emissions, while continuing to decline, are expected to slow their current reduction rate in the years ahead.

These policies is confusing even on Trump's stated objectives, analysts have said. Trump has discussed making US power “leading” and of the need for employment and additional capacity to fuel technology infrastructure, and yet has undermined this by trying to eliminate clean energy.

“I do struggle with this – if you are genuine about American energy dominance you need to implement, establish, deploy,” said Abraham Silverman, an power analyst at the academic institution.

“It's confusing and quite unusual to say wind and solar has no role in the US grid when these are often the fastest and cheapest sources. A genuine contradiction in the government's primary statements.”

America's neglect of climate concerns prompts larger inquiries about the US position in the global community, too. In the international competition with the Asian nation, contrasting approaches are being touted to the rest of the world: one that stays dependent to the fossil fuels touted by the world's biggest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to clean energy components, probably manufactured overseas.

“The president repeatedly humiliates the US on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the previous lead environmental consultant to the previous administration.

McCarthy believes that local governments committed to climate action can help to fill the void left by the national administration. Economies and local authorities will continue to shift, even if the administration tries to halt states from cutting pollution. But from China's viewpoint, the race to influence power, and thereby change the overall trajectory of this era, may already be over.

“The last chance for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a China climate policy expert at the research organization, of Trump's dismantling of the climate legislation, Biden's environmental law. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim