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Six years after the president allegedly penned a questionable greeting to the financier, the sitting US president put his name to something that now seems almost as shocking: a letter demanding measures on the climate crisis.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was part of a coalition of corporate executives behind a large ad calling for legislation to “address climate change, an urgent issue confronting the United States and the planet today”. The US needs to lead on renewable power, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and irreversible effects for mankind and our world”.

Today, the document is jarring. The globe continues to dawdle in policy in its reaction to the environmental emergency but renewable power is booming, accounting for almost all additional power generation and attracting twice the funding of fossil fuels globally. The economy, as those business leaders from 2009 would now note, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, the president has become the world's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, directing the might of the American leadership into a rearguard battle to keep the world mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the collective effort to prevent environmental collapse than the current administration.

When global representatives 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 deals with environmental talks has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it unclear who, should any attend, will speak for the planet's foremost economic and military superpower in Belem.

Similar to his initial presidency, the administration has again pulled out the US from the international environmental agreement, opened up more territories for oil and gas drilling, and set about removing clean air protections that would have prevented numerous fatalities throughout the nation. These reversals will “deal a blow through the heart of the climate change religion”, as the EPA head, the president's head of the environmental regulator, gleefully put it.

But Trump's latest spell in the White House has progressed beyond, to radical measures that have astonished many onlookers.

Instead of simply boost a carbon energy sector that contributed significantly to his election campaign, Trump has begun obliterating clean energy projects: stopping offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, prohibiting renewable energy from government property, and eliminating financial support for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while handing new public funds to a apparently hopeless attempt to revive the coal industry).

“We are certainly in a different environment 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 initial administration.

“There's a focus on dismantlement rather than construction. It's hard to see. We're absent for a major global issue and are surrendering that position to our competitors, which is not good for the United States.”

Not content with abandoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, Trump has attempted involvement in other countries' climate policies, criticizing the UK for erecting wind turbines and for not drilling enough oil for his preference. He has also pushed the EU to agree to purchase $750 billion in US oil and gas over the coming 36 months, as well as concluding fossil fuel deals with the Asian nation and South Korea.

“Nations are on the brink of collapse because of the renewable power initiative,” the president told unresponsive leaders during a international address last month. “Unless you get away from this green scam, your country is going to decline. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

The president has attempted to reshape language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his aversion at seeing renewable generators from his overseas property in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “disgusting” and “inadequate”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has cut or concealed unfavorable environmental studies, removed mentions of global warming from government websites and created an flawed report in their stead and even, despite Trump's claimed support for open dialogue, drawn up a list of banned terms, such as “carbon reduction”, “environmentally friendly”, “emissions” and “green”. The mere reporting of carbon output is now forbidden, too.

Fossil fuels, in contrast, have been rebranded. “I've established a small directive in the White House,” Trump revealed 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 slowed the adoption of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, concerned companies closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean energy projects, costing more than sixteen thousand positions, most of them in Republican-held districts.

Energy prices are increasing for US citizens as a consequence; and the US's global warming pollutants, while still falling, are expected to slow their current reduction rate in the years ahead.

These policies 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 power 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 American energy dominance you need to implement, deploy, deploy,” said an energy specialist, an power analyst at the academic institution.

“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. There's a real tension in the government's main messages.”

America's neglect of climate concerns raises larger inquiries about the US position in the world, too. In the geopolitical struggle with China, contrasting approaches are being promoted to the rest of the world: one that remains hooked to the fossil fuels advocated by the world's biggest fossil fuel exporter, or one that shifts to clean energy components, probably made in China.

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

McCarthy believes that American cities and states dedicated to climate action can help to fill the void left by the national administration. Economies and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if Trump tries to halt states from reducing emissions. But from China's perspective, the competition to influence power, and thereby alter the general direction of this era, may have concluded.

“The final opportunity for the US to join the green bandwagon has left the station,” said a China analyst, 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. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a competition. The US is {just not|sim