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Half a dozen years following the president reportedly penned a questionable birthday note to the financier, the current American leader signed to something that now seems almost as shocking: a document calling for measures on the climate crisis.

In 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a coalition of corporate executives behind a large ad urging legislation to “address climate change, an urgent issue facing the United States and the planet today”. The US needs to lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and permanent consequences for mankind and our planet”.

Nowadays, the document is jarring. The world still delays politically in its response to the environmental emergency but renewable power is expanding, accounting for nearly every new energy capacity and attracting twice the funding of fossil fuels worldwide. The market, as those executives from 2009 would now observe, has changed.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the world's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the might of the American leadership into a rearguard battle to keep the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the unified attempt to stave off environmental collapse than Trump.

As world leaders gather for UN climate talks next month, the increase of the administration's opposition towards climate action will be apparent. The American diplomatic corps' division that deals with environmental talks has been abolished as “redundant”, making it uncertain which representatives, if anyone, will speak for the world's leading economic and defense superpower in Belem.

As in his first term, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, opened up more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and set about dismantling clean air protections that would have prevented numerous fatalities across America. These reversals will “deal a blow through the core of the climate change religion”, as the EPA head, Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

However the administration's latest spell in the executive branch has progressed beyond, to extremes that have astonished many observers.

Instead of simply support a carbon energy sector that contributed significantly to his political race, the president has set about obliterating 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 providing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile attempt to restore coal).

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

“There's a focus on dismantling rather than construction. It's hard to see. We're not present for a significant worldwide concern and are ceding that position to our rivals, which is not good 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 installing wind turbines and for not extracting enough petroleum for his preference. He has also pushed the EU to agree to buy $750bn in American fossil fuels over the next three years, as well as striking carbon energy agreements with the Asian nation and South Korea.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” the president told stony-faced leaders during a international address last month. “Unless you distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your nation 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 terminology around energy and climate, too. The leader, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at seeing renewable generators from his overseas property in 2011, has called turbine power “unattractive”, “disgusting” and “inadequate”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has cut or concealed unfavorable environmental studies, deleted references of global warming from official sites and produced an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite the president's supposed support for open dialogue, compiled a inventory of prohibited phrases, such as “carbon reduction”, “sustainable”, “pollutants” and “eco-friendly”. The simple documentation of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

Carbon energy, in contrast, have been rebranded. “I have a little standing order in the executive mansion,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Never use the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

These actions has hindered the adoption of renewable power in the US: in the first half of the year, concerned businesses closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean energy projects, eliminating more than sixteen thousand positions, most of them in Republican-held districts.

Power costs are rising for Americans as a result; and the US's planet-heating emissions, while still falling, are expected to slow their current reduction rate in the coming period.

These policies is perplexing even on Trump's own terms, analysts have said. The president has discussed making American energy “dominant” and of the need for employment and additional capacity to power technology infrastructure, and yet has undercut this by trying to eliminate clean energy.

“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 confusing and quite unusual to say renewable energy has zero place in the American system when these are frequently the fastest and most affordable sources. There's a real tension in the administration's main messages.”

The US government's abandonment of environmental issues prompts broader questions about the US position in the world, too. In the international competition with the Asian nation, contrasting approaches are being touted to the global community: one that stays dependent to the fossil fuels advocated by the planet's largest fossil fuel exporter, or one that shifts to renewable technology, probably manufactured overseas.

“Trump repeatedly humiliates the US on the world platform and undermine the concerns of US citizens at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the previous top climate adviser to Joe Biden.

The expert believes that American cities and states dedicated to environmental measures can help to address the gap left by the national administration. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if the administration tries to halt states from reducing emissions. But from China's viewpoint, the competition to shape energy, and thereby alter the overall trajectory of this era, may already be over.

“The final opportunity for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a Asian environmental specialist at the research organization, of Trump's dismemberment of the climate legislation, Biden's signature climate bill. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a competition. The US is {just not|sim