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Six years following the president allegedly wrote a suggestive birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting American leader put his name to something that now appears almost as shocking: a letter demanding measures on the climate crisis.

In 2009, the businessman, then a real estate developer and television star, was part of a group of business leaders behind a large ad urging legislation to “address climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the planet today”. The US needs to take the forefront on clean energy, the signatories wrote, to avoid “disastrous and permanent consequences for humanity and our world”.

Today, the document is jarring. The globe continues to dawdle politically in its reaction to the environmental emergency but renewable power is booming, accounting for nearly every additional power generation and drawing double the investment of traditional energy globally. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has changed.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the world's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the might of the US presidency into a defensive fight to maintain the world mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no stronger single opponent to the collective effort to stave off environmental collapse than Trump.

When global representatives gather for UN climate talks in the coming weeks, the escalation of the administration's hostility towards climate action will be apparent. The American diplomatic corps' division that handles climate negotiations has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it uncertain who, if anyone, will speak for the world's leading financial and defense superpower in Belem.

Similar to his first term, the administration has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, opened up more territories for fossil fuel extraction, and set about dismantling clean air protections that would have prevented numerous fatalities across America. These reversals will “deal a blow through the heart of the environmental movement”, as Lee Zeldin, Trump's leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, enthusiastically put it.

However Trump's current term in the White House has gone even further, to radical measures that have astonished many onlookers.

Instead of simply support a carbon energy sector that contributed significantly to his election campaign, the president has set about obliterating renewable initiatives: stopping ocean-based turbines that had already been approved, banning wind and solar from government property, and removing financial support for renewables and electric cars (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile effort to revive coal).

“We are certainly in a different environment than we were in the first Trump administration,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the lead environmental diplomat for the US during Trump's initial administration.

“There's a focus on dismantling rather than construction. It's difficult to witness. We're absent for a major global issue and are ceding that ground to our competitors, which is not good for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with abandoning Republican economic principles in the American power sector, Trump has attempted involvement in foreign nations' climate policies, criticizing the UK for installing renewable generators and for not extracting enough petroleum for his preference. He has also pressured the EU to consent to buy $750 billion 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 collapse because of the renewable power initiative,” the president told stony-faced officials during a UN speech recently. “Unless you distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your country is going to fail. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”

The president has attempted to reshape language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his aversion at seeing wind turbines from his overseas property in 2011, has called turbine power “unattractive”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “hoax”.

His administration has eliminated or concealed inconvenient climate research, removed references of global warming from government websites and created an flawed report in their place and even, despite Trump's claimed support for open dialogue, compiled a inventory of prohibited phrases, such as “carbon reduction”, “environmentally friendly”, “emissions” and “eco-friendly”. The simple documentation of carbon output is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I have a small directive in the White House,” the president revealed to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

These actions has slowed the implementation of renewable power in the US: in the first half of the year, concerned businesses terminated or reduced more than $22bn in renewable initiatives, costing more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in conservative areas.

Energy prices are rising for US citizens as a consequence; and the nation's global warming pollutants, while continuing to decline, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the years ahead.

This agenda is perplexing even on Trump's stated objectives, analysts have said. The president has discussed making American energy “dominant” and of the necessity for jobs and new generation to fuel technology infrastructure, and yet has undermined this by trying to eliminate clean energy.

“I find it difficult with this – if you are serious about American energy dominance you need to implement, deploy, deploy,” said an energy specialist, an power analyst at the academic institution.

“It's confusing and quite unusual to say renewable energy has no role in the American system when these are frequently the quickest and cheapest options. There's a real tension in the administration's main messages.”

America's neglect of climate concerns raises larger inquiries about the US position in the global community, too. In the international competition with China, two very different visions are being touted to the global community: one that stays dependent to the traditional energy advocated 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 world platform and weaken the interests of Americans at home,” said a former climate advisor, the previous top climate adviser to the previous administration.

McCarthy believes that American cities and states dedicated to environmental measures can help to fill the void left by the national administration. Markets and local authorities will continue to shift, even if Trump tries to stop states from reducing emissions. But from the Asian nation's perspective, the race to influence power, and thereby alter the general direction of this era, may have concluded.

“The last chance for the US to join the renewable movement has departed,” said a China analyst, a China climate policy expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of the administration's dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's environmental law. “Domestically, this isn't considered like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim