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Half a dozen years following the president reportedly wrote a questionable birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting American leader put his name to something that now seems almost as shocking: a document calling for action on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a property magnate and television star, was part of a group of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement urging laws to “address global warming, an immediate challenge confronting the United States and the world today”. The US needs to lead on renewable power, the signatories wrote, to avoid “disastrous and permanent consequences for humanity and our world”.

Nowadays, the document is striking. The globe continues to dawdle in policy in its reaction to the climate crisis but renewable power is expanding, accounting for almost all new energy capacity and attracting twice the funding of fossil fuels worldwide. The economy, as those business leaders from 2009 would now observe, has changed.

Most starkly, though, the president has become the planet's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, throwing the might of the US presidency into a defensive fight to keep the world stuck in the era of burning fossil fuels. There is now no stronger single opponent to the unified attempt to stave off environmental collapse than Trump.

As global representatives gather for international environmental negotiations next month, the increase of the administration's opposition towards environmental measures will be apparent. The US state department's division that deals with environmental talks has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it unclear who, should any attend, will represent the planet's foremost financial and defense superpower in the upcoming talks.

As in his initial presidency, 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 begun removing pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths throughout the nation. These rollbacks will “deal a blow through the heart of the climate change religion”, as the EPA head, the president's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

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

Rather than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his election campaign, Trump has set about eliminating renewable initiatives: halting offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, prohibiting wind and solar from federal land, and removing subsidies for renewables and electric cars (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a apparently hopeless effort to revive coal).

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

“The emphasis on dismantling rather than building. It's difficult to witness. We're absent for a significant worldwide concern and are ceding that position to our competitors, which is detrimental for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with jettisoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, the president has attempted involvement in other countries' environmental strategies, criticizing the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not drilling enough petroleum for his preference. He has also pressured the EU to consent to purchase $750bn in American fossil fuels over the next three years, as well as striking fossil fuel deals with Japan and South Korea.

“Countries are on the edge of destruction because of the renewable power initiative,” the president told stony-faced leaders during a UN speech last month. “Unless you get away from this environmental fraud, your country is going to fail. You need secure boundaries and conventional power if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

Trump has tried to rewire terminology around power and environment, too. The leader, who was seemingly radicalised by his aversion at seeing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “repulsive” and “pathetic”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “falsehood”.

His administration has cut or concealed inconvenient climate research, removed references of global warming from government websites and produced an flawed report in their place and even, despite the president's supposed support for free speech, compiled a inventory of prohibited phrases, such as “carbon reduction”, “environmentally friendly”, “pollutants” and “eco-friendly”. The mere reporting of carbon output is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Never use the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn't it?”

These actions has slowed the adoption of clean energy in the US: in the first half of the year, concerned companies terminated or reduced more than $22 billion in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than sixteen thousand positions, primarily in conservative areas.

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

These policies is confusing even on the president's own terms, experts have said. The president has spoken of making US power “leading” and of the necessity for jobs and new generation to fuel AI data centers, and yet has undermined this by trying to eliminate renewables.

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

“It's puzzling and quite unusual to say wind and solar has no role in the American system when these are often the fastest and cheapest options. A genuine contradiction in the administration's primary statements.”

America's neglect of climate concerns prompts larger inquiries about America's place in the global community, too. In the international competition with China, two very different visions are being touted to the rest of the world: one that stays dependent to the traditional energy touted by the world's biggest fossil fuel exporter, or one that transitions to clean energy components, likely made in China.

“Trump repeatedly humiliates the US on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” said a former climate advisor, the previous lead environmental consultant 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. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if Trump tries to stop regions from reducing emissions. But from the Asian nation's perspective, the competition to shape energy, and thereby change the general direction of this century, may have concluded.

“The last chance for the US to join the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a China climate policy expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of the administration's dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act, the previous president's environmental law. “In China, this isn't considered like a competition. The US is {just not|sim