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Half a dozen years following the president allegedly penned a suggestive greeting to the financier, the sitting US president signed to something that now seems equally surprising: a letter calling for action on the climate crisis.

In 2009, the businessman, then a property magnate and television star, was part of a coalition of corporate executives behind a full-page advertisement calling for legislation to “address global warming, an urgent issue confronting the United States and the world today”. The US must lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet”.

Nowadays, the letter is jarring. The globe continues to dawdle politically in its reaction to the climate crisis but clean energy is expanding, accounting for nearly every additional power generation and attracting twice the funding of traditional energy globally. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now observe, has shifted.

Most notably, though, Trump 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 mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no stronger individual adversary to the unified attempt to prevent environmental collapse than the current administration.

As global representatives gather for UN climate talks next month, the increase of the administration's hostility towards environmental measures will be evident. The US state department's division that deals with environmental talks has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it unclear which representatives, if anyone, will speak for the world's leading financial and military superpower in Belem.

Similar to his first term, the administration has again withdrawn the US from the international environmental agreement, opened up more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and begun dismantling pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths across America. These reversals will “deal a blow through the core of the environmental movement”, as Lee Zeldin, Trump's head of the environmental regulator, enthusiastically put it.

But the administration's current term in the executive branch has progressed beyond, to extremes that have surprised many observers.

Rather than simply boost a carbon energy sector that donated handsomely to his election campaign, Trump has set about eliminating clean energy projects: halting offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, banning renewable energy from federal land, and eliminating subsidies for renewables and zero-emission vehicles (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a apparently hopeless effort to restore 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 Trump's first term.

“The emphasis on dismantling rather than construction. 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 abandoning Republican economic principles in the American power sector, the president has sought to intervene in foreign nations' climate policies, scolding the UK for erecting wind turbines and for not extracting enough oil for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to agree to purchase $750bn in American fossil fuels over the coming 36 months, as well as concluding fossil fuel deals with the Asian nation and South Korea.

“Countries are on the brink of collapse because of the renewable power initiative,” Trump told unresponsive officials during a international address last month. “If you don't get away from this green scam, your nation is going to decline. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

Trump has tried to rewire language around power and environment, too. Trump, who was seemingly radicalised by his aversion at seeing renewable generators from his overseas property in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “repulsive” and “pathetic”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “hoax”.

His administration has cut or concealed unfavorable environmental studies, deleted references of global warming from government websites and created an flawed report in their place and even, despite Trump's claimed support for free speech, compiled a inventory of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”, “sustainable”, “pollutants” and “green”. The simple documentation of greenhouse gas emissions is now verboten, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I have a small directive in the White House,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn't it?”

These actions has slowed the adoption of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, concerned companies terminated or reduced more than $22 billion in renewable initiatives, costing more than sixteen thousand positions, most of them in conservative areas.

Power costs are increasing for Americans as a consequence; and the US's planet-heating emissions, while continuing to decline, are expected to slow their current reduction rate in the years ahead.

This agenda is perplexing even on Trump's own terms, analysts have said. Trump has spoken of making American energy “leading” and of the need for employment and additional capacity to fuel AI data centers, and yet has undercut 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, establish, install,” said Abraham Silverman, an power analyst at Johns Hopkins University.

“It's puzzling and quite unusual to say renewable energy has no role in the US grid when these are often the quickest and cheapest sources. A genuine contradiction in the administration's primary statements.”

The US government's neglect of environmental issues raises larger inquiries about America's place in the global community, too. In the international competition with the Asian nation, two very different visions are being promoted to the rest of the world: one that stays dependent to the fossil fuels touted by the world's biggest fossil fuel exporter, or one that shifts to renewable technology, likely made in China.

“The president continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and weaken the concerns of US citizens at home,” said a former climate advisor, the previous lead environmental consultant to Joe Biden.

The expert believes that American cities and states dedicated to climate action can help to address the gap left by the federal government. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if the administration tries to halt states from cutting pollution. But from the Asian nation's perspective, the race to shape energy, and thereby change the general direction of this century, may have concluded.

“The last chance for the US to jump on 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 climate legislation, the previous president's signature climate bill. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a competition. The US is {just not|sim