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Six years following the president allegedly penned a questionable greeting to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting US president signed to something that now appears equally surprising: a letter demanding action on the climate crisis.

Back in 2009, the businessman, then a property magnate and reality TV personality, was part of a coalition of corporate executives behind a large ad urging laws to “control global warming, an urgent issue facing the United States and the world today”. The US needs to take the forefront on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and irreversible effects for mankind and our world”.

Today, the letter is striking. The world still delays in policy in its response to the climate crisis but renewable power is booming, responsible for nearly every new energy capacity and drawing twice the funding of traditional energy globally. The market, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the planet's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the power of the American leadership into a rearguard battle to maintain the world mired in the era of burning fossil fuels. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the unified attempt to prevent climate breakdown than Trump.

As world leaders convene for UN climate talks next month, the escalation of Trump's hostility towards climate action will be evident. The US state department's office that handles climate negotiations has been eliminated as “redundant”, making it unclear who, if anyone, will speak for the world's leading economic and military global power in Belem.

As in his first term, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the international environmental agreement, opened up more territories for fossil fuel extraction, and begun removing clean air protections that would have prevented numerous fatalities throughout the nation. These rollbacks will “drive a stake through the core of the environmental movement”, as Lee Zeldin, the president's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

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

Instead of simply boost a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his political race, the president has set about eliminating renewable initiatives: halting ocean-based turbines that had previously authorized, banning renewable energy from federal land, and eliminating financial support for clean energy and electric cars (while providing fresh taxpayer dollars to a apparently hopeless attempt to revive the coal industry).

“We're definitely in a different environment than we were in the first Trump administration,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the chief climate negotiator for the US during Trump's first term.

“There's a focus on dismantlement rather than construction. It's difficult to witness. We're absent for a major global issue and are ceding that position to our competitors, which is not good for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with abandoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, the president has attempted involvement in other countries' climate policies, scolding the UK for installing wind turbines and for not drilling enough petroleum for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to agree to purchase $750bn in American fossil fuels over the coming 36 months, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with Japan and the Korean peninsula.

“Countries are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told unresponsive officials during a UN speech recently. “Unless you 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 great again.”

The president has tried to rewire language around power and environment, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at viewing renewable generators from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “disgusting” and “inadequate”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has cut or hidden unfavorable environmental studies, deleted references of global warming from government websites and created an flawed report in their stead and even, despite the president's supposed support for free speech, compiled a list of prohibited phrases, such as “carbon reduction”, “sustainable”, “emissions” and “eco-friendly”. The simple documentation of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I have a little standing order in the executive mansion,” the president confided to the UN. “Never use the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

All of this has hindered the adoption of clean energy in the US: in the first half of the year, concerned companies terminated or reduced more than $22bn in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than sixteen thousand positions, primarily in Republican-held districts.

Power costs are rising for Americans as a result; and the nation's planet-heating emissions, while still falling, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the coming period.

These policies is confusing even on Trump's own terms, analysts have said. Trump has spoken of making US power “leading” and of the necessity for jobs and additional capacity to power AI data centers, and yet has undermined this by attempting to stamp out clean energy.

“I find it difficult with this – if you are genuine about American energy dominance you need to deploy, establish, install,” said an energy specialist, an power analyst at Johns Hopkins University.

“It's puzzling and quite unusual to say wind and solar has zero place in the American system when these are frequently the quickest and cheapest options. A genuine contradiction in the government's main messages.”

America's neglect of environmental issues prompts broader questions about the US position in the global community, too. In the geopolitical struggle with China, two very different visions are being promoted to the global community: one that remains hooked to the fossil fuels advocated by the planet's largest oil and gas producer, or one that shifts to renewable technology, likely manufactured overseas.

“Trump continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and undermine the concerns of US citizens at home,” said a former climate advisor, the previous lead environmental consultant to the previous administration.

The expert believes that American cities and states dedicated to climate action can help to fill the void left by the federal government. Markets and local authorities will continue to evolve, even if the administration tries to halt regions from reducing emissions. But from China's perspective, the competition to influence power, and thereby alter the general direction of this century, may have concluded.

“The final opportunity for the US to join the renewable movement has left the station,” said Li Shuo, a Asian environmental specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of the administration's dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act, the previous president's signature climate bill. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim