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Half a dozen years following the president reportedly penned a questionable greeting to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting US president put his name to something that now seems almost as shocking: a letter calling for action on the environmental emergency.

In 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a coalition of business leaders behind a large ad urging laws to “control climate change, an immediate challenge facing 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 irreversible effects for humanity and our world”.

Nowadays, the document is jarring. The globe still delays politically in its reaction to the climate crisis but clean energy is booming, accounting for almost all new energy capacity and attracting double the investment of traditional energy 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 fossil fuels, directing the might of the US presidency into a rearguard battle to keep the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer single opponent to the collective effort to prevent environmental collapse than the current administration.

When global representatives gather for international environmental negotiations in the coming weeks, the increase of Trump's opposition towards environmental measures will be apparent. The US state department's division that handles climate negotiations has been eliminated as “redundant”, making it unclear which representatives, if anyone, will speak for the world's leading economic and military global power in the upcoming talks.

Similar to his first term, the administration has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more territories for fossil fuel extraction, and set about dismantling pollution controls that would have avoided numerous fatalities throughout the nation. These reversals will “deal a blow through the core of the environmental movement”, as Lee Zeldin, Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, enthusiastically put it.

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

Rather than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that donated handsomely to his political race, the president has begun obliterating clean energy projects: stopping ocean-based turbines that had already been approved, prohibiting wind and solar from government property, and eliminating subsidies for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while providing new public funds to a apparently hopeless effort to revive the coal industry).

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

“The emphasis on dismantling rather than building. It's hard to see. We're absent for a significant worldwide concern and are ceding that ground to our rivals, which is not good for the United States.”

Not content with jettisoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the American power sector, the president has attempted involvement in other countries' climate policies, scolding the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not drilling enough oil for his preference. He has also pushed the EU to consent to purchase $750bn in US oil and gas over the coming 36 months, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with the Asian nation and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” the president told unresponsive officials during a international address recently. “Unless you distance yourselves from this green scam, your nation is going to fail. You need strong borders and conventional power if you are going to be great again.”

Trump has attempted to reshape terminology around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at seeing renewable generators from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “falsehood”.

His administration has cut or concealed inconvenient climate research, deleted mentions of global warming from government websites and produced an flawed report in their place and even, despite Trump's supposed support for free speech, drawn up a inventory of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”, “environmentally friendly”, “emissions” and “green”. The simple documentation of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I have a small directive 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 slowed the implementation of clean energy in the US: in the initial six months of the year, spooked companies terminated or reduced more than $22 billion in clean energy projects, costing more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in conservative areas.

Power costs are rising for Americans as a consequence; and the nation's planet-heating emissions, while still falling, are expected to slow their current reduction rate in the years ahead.

This agenda is confusing even on Trump's own terms, analysts have said. The president has spoken of making American energy “leading” and of the necessity for employment and additional capacity to power technology infrastructure, 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 energy expert at the academic institution.

“It's confusing and very strange to say wind and solar has zero place in the American system when these are frequently the quickest and most affordable sources. A genuine contradiction in the administration's main messages.”

The US government's neglect of environmental issues prompts broader questions 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 global community: one that stays dependent to the traditional energy touted by the world's biggest oil and gas producer, or one that shifts to renewable technology, likely made in China.

“Trump repeatedly humiliates the US on the global stage and undermine the interests of US citizens at home,” said a former climate advisor, the former top climate adviser to Joe Biden.

The expert believes that local governments committed to climate action can help to fill the void left by the federal government. Economies and local authorities will continue to evolve, even if Trump tries to stop regions from cutting pollution. But from China's perspective, the race to shape energy, and thereby alter the general direction of this era, may already be over.

“The final opportunity for the US to jump on the renewable movement has departed,” said Li Shuo, a China climate policy expert at the research organization, of the administration's dismantling of the climate legislation, Biden's signature climate bill. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim