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Half a dozen years after the president reportedly penned a questionable greeting to the financier, the sitting American leader put his name to something that now appears almost as shocking: a document demanding action on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a coalition of corporate executives behind a full-page advertisement calling for legislation to “address global warming, an urgent issue confronting the United States and the world today”. The US needs to take the forefront on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible effects for mankind and our planet”.

Nowadays, the letter is striking. The globe still delays politically in its response to the climate crisis but renewable power is expanding, accounting for almost all additional power generation and attracting twice the funding of traditional energy worldwide. The economy, as those business leaders from 2009 would now observe, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, the president has become the world's leading proponent of fossil fuels, directing the power of the US presidency into a rearguard battle to keep the world mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer single opponent to the collective effort to prevent environmental collapse than Trump.

When world leaders convene for international environmental negotiations next month, the escalation of the administration's hostility towards environmental measures will be apparent. The American diplomatic corps' office that handles climate negotiations has been eliminated as “unnecessary”, making it unclear who, should any attend, will represent the world's leading economic and defense superpower in Belem.

Similar to his initial presidency, Trump has again pulled out the US from the international environmental agreement, thrown open more territories for oil and gas drilling, and set about dismantling pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths throughout the nation. These reversals will “deal a blow through the heart of the climate change religion”, as Lee Zeldin, the president's leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, enthusiastically put it.

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

Instead of simply boost a carbon energy sector that contributed significantly to his election campaign, the president has begun eliminating clean energy projects: stopping offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, prohibiting wind and solar from government property, and removing financial support for renewables and zero-emission vehicles (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile attempt to restore the coal industry).

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

“There's a focus on dismantling rather than building. It's hard to see. We're absent for a major global issue and are surrendering that position to our rivals, which is not good for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with abandoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, Trump has attempted involvement in other countries' environmental strategies, criticizing the UK for installing renewable generators and for not extracting enough oil for his preference. 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 Japan and South Korea.

“Countries are on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told unresponsive leaders during a UN speech last month. “If you don't distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your nation is going to fail. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be great again.”

Trump has tried to rewire language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was seemingly radicalised by his aversion at seeing 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 unfavorable environmental studies, removed references of global warming from government websites and created an flawed report in their place and even, despite the president's claimed support for free speech, drawn up a list of prohibited phrases, such as “decarbonisation”, “environmentally friendly”, “emissions” and “eco-friendly”. The simple documentation of carbon output is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, in contrast, have been renamed. “I have a little standing order in the executive mansion,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Never use the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Seems more appealing, doesn't it?”

All of this has slowed the implementation of renewable power in the US: in the first half of the year, spooked businesses terminated or reduced more than $22 billion in clean energy projects, costing more than sixteen thousand positions, most of them in conservative areas.

Power costs are rising for US citizens as a result; and the US's planet-heating emissions, while continuing to decline, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the coming period.

This agenda is perplexing even on Trump's stated objectives, experts have said. The president has discussed making US power “dominant” and of the necessity for employment and new generation to power technology infrastructure, and yet has undercut this by attempting to stamp out renewables.

“I do struggle with this – if you are serious about US power leadership you need to implement, deploy, deploy,” said an energy specialist, an energy expert at Johns Hopkins University.

“It's puzzling and quite unusual to say wind and solar has no role in the US grid when these are often the fastest and cheapest sources. A genuine contradiction in the government's main messages.”

America's abandonment of environmental issues raises larger inquiries about America's place in the global community, too. In the international competition with the Asian nation, two very different visions are being touted to the rest of the world: one that remains hooked to the fossil fuels advocated by the planet's largest oil and gas producer, or one that transitions to renewable technology, likely made in China.

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

The expert believes that local governments committed to environmental measures can help to fill the void left by the federal government. 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 competition to influence power, and thereby change the overall trajectory of this era, may already be over.

“The final opportunity for the US to jump on the renewable movement has departed,” said Li Shuo, a Asian environmental specialist 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 rivalry. The US is {just not|sim