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Six years after the president allegedly penned a suggestive birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the current US president put his name to something that now seems almost as shocking: a document calling for measures on the climate crisis.

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 urgent issue confronting the United States and the world today”. The US must take the forefront on renewable power, the signatories wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible effects for humanity and our world”.

Nowadays, the letter is striking. The globe still delays in policy in its reaction to the climate crisis but renewable power is booming, responsible for nearly every new energy capacity and attracting twice the funding of traditional energy worldwide. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now note, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, the president has become the planet's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, directing the power of the American leadership into a rearguard battle to keep the world stuck in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer single opponent to the unified attempt to stave off climate breakdown than the current administration.

When global representatives gather for UN climate talks in the coming weeks, the increase of the administration's opposition towards environmental measures will be apparent. The US state department's office that deals with climate negotiations has been eliminated as “redundant”, making it uncertain who, if anyone, will represent the world's leading financial and defense superpower in Belem.

Similar to his first term, Trump has again pulled out the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more land and waters for fossil fuel extraction, and set about dismantling clean air protections that would have prevented numerous fatalities across America. These reversals will “deal a blow through the heart of the environmental movement”, as the EPA head, the president's head of the environmental regulator, enthusiastically put it.

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

Instead of simply boost a carbon energy sector that donated handsomely to his election campaign, Trump has set about eliminating renewable initiatives: halting ocean-based turbines that had previously authorized, prohibiting renewable energy from government property, and removing subsidies for clean energy and zero-emission vehicles (while handing new public funds to a seemingly futile attempt to restore coal).

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

“There's a focus on dismantlement rather than building. 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 conservative economic principles in the US energy market, Trump has sought to intervene in foreign nations' environmental strategies, scolding the UK for installing wind turbines and for not extracting enough petroleum for his liking. He has also pressured the EU to agree to purchase $750 billion in American fossil fuels over the next three years, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with the Asian nation and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the edge of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” the president told unresponsive officials during a UN speech recently. “Unless you distance yourselves from this green scam, your nation is going to fail. You need secure boundaries and conventional power if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

Trump has tried to rewire language around energy and climate, too. The leader, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at seeing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “falsehood”.

The government has eliminated or concealed unfavorable environmental studies, deleted references of global warming from official sites and created an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite the president's claimed support for free speech, drawn up a list of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”, “sustainable”, “pollutants” and “green”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I have a small directive in the White House,” the president revealed to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

These actions has hindered the adoption of clean energy in the US: in the first half of the year, concerned companies terminated or reduced more than $22 billion in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in conservative areas.

Power costs are increasing for Americans as a result; and the nation's planet-heating emissions, while continuing to decline, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the years ahead.

These policies is perplexing even on the president's stated objectives, analysts have said. The president has spoken of making US power “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 do struggle with this – if you are serious about US power leadership you need to implement, deploy, install,” said an energy specialist, an energy expert at the academic institution.

“It's confusing and quite unusual to say wind and solar has zero place in the American system when these are frequently the fastest and most affordable sources. There's a real tension in the government's primary statements.”

America's neglect of climate concerns prompts broader questions about the US position in the global community, too. In the international competition with China, two very different visions are being promoted to the rest of the world: one that remains hooked to the traditional energy touted by the world's biggest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to renewable technology, likely made in China.

“The president continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and weaken the interests of US citizens at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the previous top climate adviser 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 national administration. Economies and sub-national governments will continue to shift, even if the administration tries to stop states from cutting pollution. But from China's perspective, the race to influence power, and thereby change the general direction of this century, may already be over.

“The last chance for the US to join the green bandwagon has departed,” said a China analyst, a China climate policy expert at the research organization, of Trump's dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's signature climate bill. “In China, this isn't even treated like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim