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Half a dozen years after the president reportedly penned a suggestive birthday note to the financier, the current American leader put his name to something that now appears almost as shocking: a document calling for measures on the climate crisis.

In 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and television star, was part of a coalition of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement calling for legislation to “control global warming, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the planet today”. The US must take the forefront on renewable power, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and permanent consequences for mankind and our world”.

Nowadays, the letter is striking. The globe continues to dawdle politically in its response to the environmental emergency but renewable power is expanding, accounting for almost all additional power generation and drawing twice the funding of traditional energy worldwide. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has shifted.

Most notably, though, Trump has become the world's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the power of the US presidency into a defensive fight to maintain the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no stronger single opponent to the unified attempt to prevent climate breakdown than Trump.

When world leaders convene for international environmental negotiations next month, the increase of Trump's opposition towards environmental measures will be evident. The American diplomatic corps' division that deals with climate negotiations has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it unclear who, 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Similar to his first term, the administration has again withdrawn the US from the international environmental agreement, opened up more territories for fossil fuel extraction, and begun dismantling clean air protections that would have prevented thousands of deaths throughout the nation. These reversals will “deal a blow through the core of the environmental movement”, as the EPA head, the president's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

However Trump's current term in the executive branch has gone even further, to radical measures that have astonished many onlookers.

Rather than simply support a carbon energy sector that donated handsomely to his election campaign, the president has begun eliminating renewable initiatives: stopping ocean-based turbines that had previously authorized, prohibiting renewable energy from federal land, and eliminating subsidies for renewables and electric cars (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a apparently hopeless attempt to revive the coal industry).

“We are certainly in a different environment than we were in the first Trump administration,” said a former climate negotiator, who was the chief climate negotiator for the US during the president's initial administration.

“The emphasis on dismantling rather than construction. It's hard to see. We're not present for a significant worldwide concern 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, the president has sought to intervene in foreign nations' environmental strategies, scolding the UK for installing renewable generators and for not extracting enough oil for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to consent to purchase $750 billion in US oil and gas over the next three years, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with Japan and the Korean peninsula.

“Countries are on the edge of destruction because of the renewable power initiative,” the president told unresponsive leaders during a UN speech last month. “If you don't distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your country is going to fail. You need secure boundaries and conventional power if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

Trump has attempted to reshape language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his aversion at viewing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called turbine power “ugly”, “repulsive” and “pathetic”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “falsehood”.

The government has eliminated or concealed inconvenient climate research, removed mentions of global warming from government websites and produced an flawed report in their stead and even, despite the president's claimed support for open dialogue, drawn up a inventory of prohibited phrases, such as “carbon reduction”, “environmentally friendly”, “emissions” and “eco-friendly”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

Carbon energy, in contrast, have been renamed. “I've established a little standing order in the executive mansion,” the president confided to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn't it?”

These actions has hindered the implementation of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, concerned businesses terminated or reduced more than $22bn in renewable initiatives, costing more than 16,000 jobs, most of them in conservative areas.

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

This agenda is confusing even on the president's stated objectives, analysts have said. The president has discussed making US power “dominant” and of the necessity for employment and new generation to fuel technology infrastructure, and yet has undermined this by trying to eliminate renewables.

“I find it difficult with this – if you are serious about US power leadership you need to implement, deploy, install,” said an energy specialist, an power analyst at the academic institution.

“It's puzzling and very strange to say renewable energy has no role in the American system when these are often the quickest and cheapest options. There's a real tension in the administration's main messages.”

The US government's abandonment of climate concerns raises broader questions about America's place in the world, too. In the international competition with China, contrasting approaches are being promoted to the rest of the world: one that remains hooked to the traditional energy touted by the planet's largest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to clean energy components, probably made in China.

“Trump continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and undermine the concerns of Americans at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the previous lead environmental consultant to Joe Biden.

McCarthy believes that local governments committed to climate action can help to address the gap left by the federal government. Economies and local authorities will continue to shift, even if Trump tries to halt states from reducing emissions. But from the Asian nation's perspective, the race to influence power, and thereby alter the overall trajectory of this century, may already be over.

“The last chance for the US to join the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a China climate policy expert at the research organization, of the administration's dismemberment of the climate legislation, Biden's signature climate bill. “Domestically, this isn't considered like a competition. The US is {just not|sim