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Six years after Donald Trump reportedly wrote a suggestive birthday note to the financier, the sitting American leader signed to something that now seems equally surprising: a letter demanding measures on the climate crisis.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and television star, was among a group of business leaders behind a large ad calling for laws to “address global warming, an immediate challenge confronting the United States and the planet today”. The US must take the forefront on renewable power, the signatories wrote, to avoid “disastrous and irreversible consequences for humanity and our world”.

Today, the document is jarring. The globe still delays politically in its response to the climate crisis but renewable power is booming, responsible for nearly every new energy capacity and attracting twice the funding of fossil fuels worldwide. The market, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the planet's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, directing the power 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 collective effort to stave off climate breakdown than the current administration.

As global representatives convene for UN climate talks in the coming weeks, the escalation of Trump's opposition towards climate action will be apparent. The US state department's office that deals with environmental talks has been abolished as “unnecessary”, making it uncertain which representatives, if anyone, will speak for the planet's foremost financial and defense superpower in Belem.

Similar to his first term, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more territories for oil and gas drilling, and begun removing pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths across America. These reversals will “drive a stake through the core of the climate change religion”, as Lee Zeldin, the president's leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

But Trump's current term in the White House has progressed beyond, to radical measures that have astonished many observers.

Instead of simply support a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his election campaign, the president has set about obliterating renewable initiatives: stopping ocean-based turbines that had already been approved, banning wind and solar from government property, and removing subsidies for renewables and electric cars (while handing new public funds to a seemingly futile effort to restore 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 the president's first term.

“The emphasis on dismantling rather than construction. It's hard to see. We're absent for a major global issue and are surrendering that position to our competitors, which is detrimental for the United States.”

Not content with abandoning conservative economic principles in the US energy market, Trump has sought to intervene in other countries' climate policies, criticizing the UK for erecting wind turbines and for not extracting enough petroleum for his liking. He has also pressured the EU to consent to buy $750bn in US oil and gas over the next three years, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with Japan and South Korea.

“Countries are on the edge of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” the president told stony-faced officials during a UN speech 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 prosperous once more.”

The president has tried to rewire language around energy and climate, too. The leader, who was seemingly radicalised by his disgust at seeing 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 eliminated or concealed unfavorable environmental studies, deleted references of climate change from official sites and produced an error-strewn study in their place and even, despite the president's supposed support for free speech, drawn up a list of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”, “environmentally friendly”, “pollutants” and “green”. 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 ‘coal’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

These actions has hindered the implementation of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, spooked businesses closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean energy projects, costing more than 16,000 jobs, most of them in Republican-held districts.

Power costs 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 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 jobs and new generation to power AI data centers, and yet has undermined this by trying to eliminate clean energy.

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

“It's puzzling and very strange to say wind and solar has zero place in the American system when these are often the quickest and most affordable sources. A genuine contradiction 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 geopolitical struggle with the Asian nation, contrasting approaches are being touted to the rest of the world: one that stays dependent to the fossil fuels touted by the planet's largest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to clean energy components, probably manufactured overseas.

“Trump repeatedly humiliates the US on the world platform and weaken the concerns of US citizens at home,” said a former climate advisor, the previous top climate adviser to Joe Biden.

McCarthy believes that local governments dedicated to environmental measures can help to address the gap left by the national administration. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to evolve, even if Trump tries to halt states from reducing emissions. But from China's perspective, the competition to influence power, and thereby change the overall trajectory of this era, may have concluded.

“The last chance for the US to join the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a Asian environmental specialist at the research organization, of the administration's dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's environmental law. “In China, this isn't even treated like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim