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Half a dozen years after the president allegedly penned a suggestive birthday note to the financier, the current American leader put his name to something that now seems equally surprising: a document calling for measures on the environmental emergency.

In 2009, the businessman, then a property magnate and reality TV personality, was among a group of business leaders behind a large ad calling for laws to “address climate change, an urgent issue confronting the United States and the planet today”. The US must lead on clean energy, the signatories wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and permanent consequences for humanity and our world”.

Today, the letter is jarring. The globe continues to dawdle politically in its reaction to the environmental emergency but renewable power is expanding, accounting for almost all additional power generation and attracting twice the funding of fossil fuels globally. The market, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has changed.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the planet's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, directing the might of the American leadership into a defensive fight to maintain the world mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no stronger individual adversary to the unified attempt to prevent climate breakdown than Trump.

As global representatives convene for international environmental negotiations in the coming weeks, the escalation of Trump's hostility towards climate action will be apparent. The American diplomatic corps' division that handles climate negotiations has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it uncertain who, if anyone, will speak for the world's leading economic and defense global power in the upcoming talks.

As in his first term, Trump has again pulled out the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and set about dismantling pollution controls that would have avoided numerous fatalities across America. These reversals will “drive a stake through the core of the environmental movement”, as the EPA head, the president's leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

However the administration's current term in the White House has progressed beyond, to extremes that have astonished many observers.

Rather than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his political race, the president has set about obliterating clean energy projects: halting offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, prohibiting renewable energy from government property, and removing subsidies for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while providing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile effort to revive the coal industry).

“We're definitely in a changed situation than we were in the first Trump administration,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the lead environmental diplomat for the US during the president's first term.

“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.”

Unsatisfied with abandoning conservative economic principles in the US energy market, Trump has attempted involvement in other countries' climate policies, criticizing the UK for installing wind turbines and for not extracting enough oil for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to consent to purchase $750 billion 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 brink of destruction because of the renewable power initiative,” Trump told unresponsive leaders during a international address last month. “If you don't distance yourselves from this green scam, your nation is going to decline. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”

Trump has attempted to reshape terminology around power and environment, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at viewing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called turbine power “unattractive”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “hoax”.

His administration has cut or concealed inconvenient climate research, deleted references of climate change from government websites and produced an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite Trump's supposed support for open dialogue, compiled a list of banned terms, such as “carbon reduction”, “sustainable”, “emissions” and “eco-friendly”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I have a little standing order in the executive mansion,” Trump confided to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

These actions has slowed the adoption of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, concerned businesses closed or downscaled more than $22bn in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than sixteen thousand positions, most of them in conservative areas.

Energy prices are increasing for US citizens as a result; and the nation's global warming pollutants, while continuing to decline, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the coming period.

This agenda is confusing even on the president's stated objectives, experts 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 undermined this by attempting to stamp out clean energy.

“I do struggle with this – if you are serious about American energy dominance you need to implement, deploy, install,” said Abraham Silverman, an power analyst at the academic institution.

“It's confusing and quite unusual to say renewable energy has zero place in the American system when these are frequently the quickest and cheapest options. A genuine contradiction in the government's primary statements.”

The US government's abandonment of environmental issues prompts larger inquiries about the US position in the world, too. In the international competition with China, contrasting approaches are being promoted to the rest of the world: one that stays dependent to the traditional energy advocated by the world's biggest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to clean energy components, probably manufactured overseas.

“Trump continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and undermine the concerns of Americans at home,” said a former climate advisor, the former top climate adviser to Joe Biden.

The expert believes that American cities and states committed to environmental measures can help to address the gap left by the federal government. Economies and local authorities will continue to shift, even if the administration tries to stop states from reducing emissions. But from China's perspective, the competition to shape energy, and thereby change the overall trajectory of this era, may have concluded.

“The final opportunity for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has departed,” said a China analyst, a China climate policy expert at the research organization, of the administration's dismantling of the climate legislation, the previous president's environmental law. “In China, this isn't considered like a competition. The US is {just not|sim