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Half a dozen years after Donald Trump allegedly penned a suggestive greeting to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting American leader put his name to something that now appears almost as shocking: a document calling for action on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a property magnate and reality TV personality, was among a group of business leaders behind a large ad calling for laws to “control global warming, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today”. The US must take the forefront on renewable power, the signatories wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and permanent effects for mankind and our world”.

Nowadays, the letter is jarring. The world still delays in policy in its response to the environmental emergency but renewable power is booming, accounting for nearly every additional power generation and drawing twice the funding of traditional energy globally. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has changed.

Most notably, though, the president has become the world's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the power of the American leadership into a defensive fight to maintain the world mired in the age of burning fossil fuels. There is now no fiercer single opponent to the unified attempt to stave off environmental collapse than Trump.

When world leaders gather for UN climate talks next month, the escalation of Trump's hostility towards climate action will be apparent. The US state department's office that handles climate negotiations has been eliminated as “unnecessary”, making it unclear who, if anyone, will represent the world's leading financial and military global power in Belem.

As in his initial presidency, the administration has again pulled out the US from the Paris climate deal, opened up more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and set about dismantling pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths across America. These reversals will “drive a stake through the heart of the climate change religion”, as the EPA head, Trump's head of the environmental regulator, enthusiastically put it.

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

Rather than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his political race, Trump has begun obliterating renewable initiatives: halting ocean-based turbines that had previously authorized, banning renewable energy from federal land, and eliminating subsidies for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while providing new public funds to a apparently hopeless effort to revive coal).

“We're definitely in a different environment than we were in the initial presidency,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the lead environmental diplomat for the US during the president's initial administration.

“The emphasis on dismantlement rather than building. It's difficult to witness. We're absent for a significant worldwide concern and are surrendering that position to our rivals, which is not good for the United States.”

Not content with jettisoning conservative economic principles in the US energy market, the president has attempted involvement in other countries' climate policies, criticizing the UK for installing renewable generators and for not drilling enough oil for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to consent to buy $750bn in US oil and gas over the coming 36 months, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with Japan and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the brink of destruction because of the renewable power initiative,” the president told unresponsive leaders during a international address recently. “If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. You need strong borders and conventional power if you are going to be great again.”

The president has attempted to reshape terminology around power and environment, too. The leader, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at viewing wind turbines from his overseas property in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “falsehood”.

The government has cut or concealed inconvenient climate research, removed mentions of climate change from government websites and produced an error-strewn study in their place and even, despite the president's supposed support for open dialogue, compiled a inventory of prohibited phrases, such as “carbon reduction”, “environmentally friendly”, “pollutants” and “green”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

Carbon energy, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I've established a little standing order in the executive mansion,” Trump confided to the UN. “Never use the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. 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 businesses closed or downscaled more than $22 billion in renewable initiatives, costing more than sixteen thousand positions, primarily in conservative areas.

Power costs are rising for Americans as a result; and the US's global warming pollutants, while still falling, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the years ahead.

These policies is perplexing even on the president's own terms, analysts have said. Trump has discussed making American energy “dominant” and of the need for jobs and new generation to fuel AI data centers, and yet has undermined this by attempting to stamp out renewables.

“I find it difficult with this – if you are genuine about US power leadership you need to implement, deploy, deploy,” said an energy specialist, an energy expert at Johns Hopkins University.

“It's puzzling and very strange to say renewable energy has no role in the US grid when these are frequently the quickest and cheapest options. There's a real tension in the administration's main messages.”

America's abandonment of environmental issues raises larger inquiries about the US position in the global community, too. In the international competition with the Asian nation, two very different visions are being touted to the global community: one that remains hooked to the traditional energy touted by the planet's largest oil and gas producer, or one that shifts to clean energy components, likely made in China.

“The president repeatedly humiliates the US on the world platform and undermine the concerns of Americans 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 address the gap left by the national administration. Economies and local authorities will continue to evolve, even if Trump tries to stop states from reducing emissions. But from the Asian nation's viewpoint, the competition to shape energy, and thereby alter the general direction of this era, may already be over.

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