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Six years after the president allegedly wrote a questionable birthday note to the financier, the sitting US president put his name to something that now appears equally surprising: a document calling for measures on the climate crisis.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a property magnate and reality TV personality, was among a coalition of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement urging laws to “address climate change, an immediate challenge confronting the United States and the planet today”. The US needs to lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and permanent consequences for mankind and our world”.

Nowadays, the document is striking. The world continues to dawdle in policy in its reaction to the environmental emergency but renewable power is expanding, responsible for almost all new energy capacity and drawing twice the funding of traditional energy globally. The economy, as those business leaders from 2009 would now observe, has changed.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the world's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the might of the American leadership into a defensive fight to keep the world mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no stronger individual adversary to the collective effort to prevent climate breakdown than the current administration.

When global representatives convene for UN climate talks next month, the increase of the administration's hostility towards climate action will be evident. The American diplomatic corps' division that deals with environmental talks has been eliminated as “unnecessary”, making it uncertain which representatives, should any attend, will represent the world's leading financial and defense global power in the upcoming talks.

As in his first term, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the international environmental agreement, opened up more territories for fossil fuel extraction, and set about dismantling pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths throughout the nation. These reversals will “deal a blow through the core of the climate change religion”, as Lee Zeldin, the president's leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

However Trump's current term in the executive branch has progressed beyond, to extremes that have astonished many observers.

Instead of simply boost a carbon energy sector that contributed significantly to his election campaign, the president has begun eliminating clean energy projects: halting ocean-based turbines that had previously authorized, banning renewable energy from government property, and removing subsidies for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while handing new public funds to a apparently hopeless effort to revive the coal industry).

“We are certainly in a changed situation than we were in the initial presidency,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the chief climate negotiator for the US during the president's first term.

“The emphasis on dismantling rather than construction. It's hard to see. We're not present for a significant worldwide concern and are surrendering that position to our competitors, which is detrimental for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with abandoning conservative economic principles in the American power sector, Trump has sought to intervene in foreign nations' climate policies, scolding the UK for erecting wind turbines and for not extracting enough petroleum for his liking. He has also pressured the EU to agree to purchase $750 billion in US oil and gas over the coming 36 months, as well as striking fossil fuel deals with the Asian nation and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told unresponsive officials during a international address last month. “If you don't distance yourselves from this green scam, your nation is going to decline. You need strong borders and conventional power if you are going to be great again.”

The president has tried to rewire terminology 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 “unattractive”, “disgusting” and “pathetic”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has eliminated or concealed unfavorable environmental studies, deleted references of climate change from official sites and produced an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite the president's claimed support for open dialogue, drawn up a inventory of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”, “sustainable”, “pollutants” and “eco-friendly”. The simple documentation of carbon output is now forbidden, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” the president revealed to the UN. “Never use the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

All of this has slowed the adoption of clean energy in the US: in the initial six months of the year, spooked businesses terminated or reduced more than $22bn in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in Republican-held districts.

Power costs are increasing for US citizens as a result; 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 the president's stated objectives, analysts have said. The president has discussed making US power “leading” and of the need for employment and new generation to fuel AI data centers, and yet has undercut this by trying to eliminate clean energy.

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

“It's confusing and very strange to say wind and solar has no role in the American system when these are often the quickest and most affordable options. There's a real tension in the administration's primary statements.”

America's abandonment of climate concerns raises broader questions about America's place in the global community, too. In the international competition with the Asian nation, contrasting approaches are being promoted to the global community: one that stays dependent to the fossil fuels touted by the planet's largest fossil fuel exporter, or one that transitions to renewable technology, probably manufactured overseas.

“Trump continues to embarrass the US on the world platform and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the former lead environmental consultant to the previous administration.

McCarthy believes that American cities and states committed to climate action can help to address the gap left by the national administration. Markets and local authorities will continue to evolve, even if the administration tries to stop regions from cutting pollution. But from the Asian nation's viewpoint, the race to shape energy, and thereby change the general direction of this century, may already be over.

“The last chance for the US to jump on the renewable movement has left the station,” said a China analyst, a China climate policy expert at the research organization, of the administration's dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's environmental law. “In China, this isn't considered like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim