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Six years following the president allegedly penned a questionable birthday note to the financier, the sitting US president signed to something that now appears equally surprising: a letter demanding measures on the climate crisis.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a property magnate and television star, was among a group of business leaders behind a large ad calling for laws to “control global warming, 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 consequences for humanity and our world”.

Nowadays, the document is jarring. The world continues to dawdle politically in its reaction to the environmental emergency but renewable power is expanding, accounting for nearly every additional power generation and attracting double the investment of traditional energy worldwide. The market, as those business leaders from 2009 would now observe, has changed.

Most starkly, though, the president has become the planet's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the power of the American leadership into a defensive fight to keep the world mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer individual adversary 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 escalation of the administration's opposition towards climate action will be evident. The US state department's division that handles environmental talks has been abolished as “redundant”, making it unclear which representatives, if anyone, will represent the world's leading financial and defense superpower in Belem.

As in his initial presidency, the administration has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more territories for oil and gas drilling, and set about dismantling clean air protections that would have avoided numerous fatalities throughout the nation. These reversals will “deal a blow through the core of the climate change religion”, as the EPA head, Trump's leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, gleefully put it.

But the administration's current term in the White House has gone even further, to extremes that have astonished many onlookers.

Rather than simply boost a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his political race, the president has set about eliminating clean energy projects: halting ocean-based turbines that had previously authorized, banning renewable energy from government property, and removing subsidies for renewables and electric cars (while handing new public funds to a apparently hopeless effort to restore the coal industry).

“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 dismantlement rather than construction. It's hard to see. We're absent for a significant worldwide concern and are surrendering that ground to our rivals, which is not good for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with abandoning conservative 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 extracting enough oil for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to consent to buy $750 billion in US oil and gas over the next three years, as well as striking carbon energy agreements with the Asian nation and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the renewable power initiative,” the president told stony-faced leaders during a international address last month. “Unless you distance yourselves from this green scam, your nation is going to fail. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

The president has tried to rewire terminology around power and environment, too. The leader, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at viewing renewable generators from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called turbine power “unattractive”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “falsehood”.

The government has cut or concealed inconvenient climate research, removed mentions of global warming from official sites and created an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite the president's supposed support for open dialogue, drawn up a list of prohibited phrases, such as “decarbonisation”, “environmentally friendly”, “pollutants” and “eco-friendly”. The simple documentation of greenhouse gas emissions is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

All of this has slowed the adoption of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, concerned companies closed or downscaled more than $22bn in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than 16,000 jobs, most of them in conservative areas.

Power costs are rising for US citizens as a result; and the nation's global warming pollutants, while continuing to decline, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the coming period.

This agenda is perplexing even on the president's own terms, analysts have said. Trump has discussed making US power “dominant” and of the need for employment and new generation to fuel technology infrastructure, and yet has undercut this by trying to eliminate clean energy.

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

“It's confusing and very strange to say wind and solar has no role in the US grid when these are frequently the quickest and cheapest sources. There's a real tension in the administration's main messages.”

The US government's abandonment of climate concerns raises larger inquiries about America's place in the global community, too. In the geopolitical struggle with China, contrasting approaches are being touted to the rest of the world: one that remains hooked to the fossil fuels advocated by the world's biggest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to renewable technology, likely manufactured overseas.

“The president repeatedly humiliates the US on the global stage and undermine the interests of US citizens at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the previous lead environmental consultant to the previous administration.

The expert believes that American cities and states dedicated to environmental measures can help to fill the void left by the national administration. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if the administration tries to halt regions from cutting pollution. But from China's perspective, the race to influence power, and thereby alter the general direction of this era, may already be over.

“The final opportunity for the US to join the green bandwagon has left the station,” said a China analyst, a Asian environmental specialist at the research organization, of the administration's dismemberment of the climate legislation, Biden's environmental law. “In China, this isn't considered like a competition. The US is {just not|sim