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Half a dozen years following the president reportedly penned a questionable greeting to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting US president signed to something that now seems equally surprising: a document demanding action on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a coalition of corporate executives behind a full-page advertisement urging laws to “control climate change, an immediate challenge confronting the United States and the planet today”. The US must take the forefront on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and permanent effects for mankind and our planet”.

Today, the letter is jarring. The world continues to dawdle politically in its response to the climate crisis but clean energy is booming, accounting for nearly every new energy capacity and attracting twice the funding of traditional energy worldwide. The market, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the world's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, directing the power of the American leadership into a defensive fight to keep the world stuck in the era of burning fossil fuels. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the unified attempt to stave off climate breakdown than the current administration.

As global representatives convene for international environmental negotiations in the coming weeks, the increase of the administration's opposition towards environmental measures will be apparent. The US state department's office that deals with environmental talks has been abolished as “redundant”, making it uncertain who, if anyone, will represent the planet's foremost financial and military superpower in Belem.

Similar to his initial presidency, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, opened up more territories for oil and gas drilling, and begun removing pollution controls that would have prevented numerous fatalities across America. These rollbacks will “deal a blow through the heart of the environmental movement”, as the EPA head, the president's head of the environmental regulator, gleefully put it.

However Trump's latest spell in the executive branch has gone even further, to extremes that have astonished many onlookers.

Rather than simply boost a carbon energy sector that donated handsomely to his political race, the president has begun obliterating renewable initiatives: halting offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, prohibiting renewable energy from federal land, and eliminating financial support for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while handing new public funds to a seemingly futile attempt to revive the coal industry).

“We are certainly in a changed situation than we were in the initial presidency,” said a former climate negotiator, who was the lead environmental diplomat for the US during Trump's initial administration.

“There's a focus on dismantlement rather than building. It's difficult to witness. We're not present for a major global issue and are ceding that ground to our rivals, which is detrimental for the United States.”

Not content 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 drilling enough oil for his preference. He has also pressured the EU to consent to purchase $750 billion in American fossil fuels over the coming 36 months, as well as striking carbon energy agreements with Japan and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told stony-faced leaders during a international address recently. “Unless you get away from this green scam, your nation is going to fail. You need strong borders and conventional power if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

The president has tried to rewire language around power and environment, too. Trump, who was seemingly radicalised by his disgust at viewing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called turbine power “unattractive”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has cut or hidden inconvenient climate research, removed mentions of global warming from government websites and produced an error-strewn study 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 simple documentation of carbon output is now verboten, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I have 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 first half of the year, spooked businesses closed or downscaled more than $22bn in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in Republican-held districts.

Power costs are increasing for Americans as a result; and the US's planet-heating emissions, while continuing to decline, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the coming period.

These policies is confusing even on the president's own terms, analysts have said. Trump has spoken of making American energy “dominant” and of the need for employment and additional capacity to power AI data centers, and yet has undercut this by attempting to stamp out renewables.

“I do struggle with this – if you are genuine about American energy dominance you need to deploy, deploy, deploy,” said Abraham Silverman, an energy expert 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 fastest and cheapest sources. There's a real tension in the government's primary statements.”

The US government's abandonment of environmental issues raises broader questions about the US position in the world, too. In the geopolitical struggle with the Asian nation, two very different visions are being touted to the global community: one that stays dependent to the traditional energy touted by the planet's largest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to renewable technology, probably manufactured overseas.

“The president continues to embarrass the US on the world platform and weaken the interests of US citizens at home,” said a former climate advisor, the previous lead environmental consultant to the previous administration.

McCarthy believes that local governments dedicated to environmental measures can help to address the gap left by the federal government. Markets and sub-national governments 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 overall trajectory of this era, may have concluded.

“The last chance for the US to join the green bandwagon has left the station,” said a China analyst, a Asian environmental specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of the administration's dismemberment of the climate legislation, Biden's environmental law. “Domestically, this isn't considered like a competition. The US is {just not|sim