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Half a dozen years following the president allegedly wrote a questionable birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting US president signed to something that now seems equally surprising: a letter calling for measures on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a group of business leaders behind a large ad urging laws to “address climate change, an urgent issue confronting the United States and the world today”. The US needs to lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and irreversible effects for humanity and our planet”.

Today, the document is striking. The globe continues to dawdle in policy in its reaction to the climate crisis but renewable power is booming, responsible for nearly every new energy capacity and attracting twice the funding of traditional energy globally. The market, as those business leaders from 2009 would now observe, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the world's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, directing the power of the American leadership into a defensive fight to maintain the world stuck in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the collective effort to prevent climate breakdown than the current administration.

As world leaders convene for international environmental negotiations next month, the increase of Trump's opposition towards environmental measures will be apparent. The American diplomatic corps' division that handles environmental talks has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it unclear which representatives, should any attend, will speak for the world's leading financial and defense global power in Belem.

As in his first term, the administration has again pulled out the US from the international environmental agreement, thrown open more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and set about removing clean air protections that would have prevented thousands of deaths throughout the nation. These rollbacks will “deal a blow through the heart of the environmental movement”, as Lee Zeldin, the president's head of the environmental regulator, gleefully put it.

But the administration's latest spell in the executive branch has gone even further, to extremes that have surprised many observers.

Instead of simply boost a carbon energy sector that contributed significantly to his political race, Trump has begun eliminating renewable initiatives: halting offshore windfarms that had already been approved, prohibiting wind and solar from federal land, and removing subsidies for clean energy and electric cars (while handing new public funds to a apparently hopeless attempt to restore coal).

“We're definitely in a changed situation than we were in the initial presidency,” said a former climate negotiator, who was the lead environmental diplomat for the US during the president's first term.

“There's a focus on dismantling rather than building. It's difficult to witness. We're not present for a major global issue and are surrendering that position to our rivals, which is not good for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with abandoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the American power sector, the president has attempted involvement in foreign nations' climate policies, criticizing the UK for installing wind turbines and for not extracting enough oil for his preference. He has also pressured the EU to agree to buy $750bn in American fossil fuels over the next three years, as well as concluding fossil fuel deals with the Asian nation and South Korea.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told unresponsive leaders during a UN speech last month. “If you don't distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your country is going to decline. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”

The president has attempted to reshape terminology 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 wind energy “unattractive”, “repulsive” and “pathetic”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has cut or concealed inconvenient climate research, deleted references of global warming from government websites and produced an flawed report in their place and even, despite Trump's claimed support for free speech, drawn up a inventory of prohibited phrases, such as “carbon reduction”, “sustainable”, “pollutants” and “eco-friendly”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I have a small directive in the White House,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

These actions has hindered the implementation of renewable power in the US: in the first half of the year, concerned companies closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean energy projects, costing more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in Republican-held districts.

Power costs are rising for US citizens as a result; and the US'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 own terms, experts have said. The president has discussed making US power “leading” and of the necessity for employment and additional capacity to power AI data centers, and yet has undermined this by attempting to stamp out clean energy.

“I find it difficult with this – if you are serious about American energy dominance you need to implement, establish, deploy,” said an energy specialist, an energy expert at Johns Hopkins University.

“It's puzzling and very strange to say wind and solar has zero place in the US grid when these are frequently the fastest and most affordable options. There's a real tension in the administration's main messages.”

The US government's abandonment of environmental issues raises broader questions about the US position in the world, too. In the international competition with China, contrasting approaches are being promoted to the global community: one that stays dependent to the fossil fuels touted by the world's biggest fossil fuel exporter, or one that transitions to renewable technology, probably made in China.

“Trump repeatedly humiliates the US on the world platform and undermine the concerns of US citizens at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the previous top climate adviser to Joe Biden.

McCarthy believes that American cities and states committed to climate action can help to fill the void left by the national administration. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if the administration tries to stop regions from cutting pollution. But from China's perspective, the competition to shape energy, and thereby alter the general direction of this era, may have concluded.

“The last chance for the US to join the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a Asian environmental specialist at the research organization, of the administration's dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, the previous president's environmental law. “In China, this isn't considered like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim