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Half a dozen years following Donald Trump allegedly wrote a questionable greeting to the financier, the sitting US president put his name to something that now seems equally surprising: a letter demanding measures on the environmental emergency.

In 2009, Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a group of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement urging legislation to “control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today”. The US needs to lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and permanent effects for mankind and our world”.

Today, the letter is jarring. The world still delays in policy in its response to the climate crisis but clean energy is booming, accounting for nearly every additional power generation and drawing twice the funding of fossil fuels globally. The market, as those business leaders from 2009 would now note, has changed.

Most starkly, though, the president has become the world's leading proponent of fossil fuels, throwing the power of the American leadership into a rearguard battle to maintain the world stuck in the age of burning fossil fuels. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the unified attempt to prevent climate breakdown than the current administration.

As global representatives convene for international environmental negotiations in the coming weeks, the increase of Trump's opposition towards climate action will be evident. The US state department's division that deals with climate negotiations has been eliminated as “unnecessary”, making it uncertain which representatives, if anyone, will represent the world's leading economic and defense superpower in the upcoming talks.

As in his first term, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the international environmental agreement, opened up more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and set about dismantling pollution controls that would have prevented numerous fatalities throughout the nation. These rollbacks will “deal a blow through the heart of the climate change religion”, as Lee Zeldin, Trump's head of the environmental regulator, enthusiastically put it.

But Trump's latest spell in the executive branch has gone even further, to extremes that have surprised many observers.

Instead of simply boost a carbon energy sector that donated handsomely to his political race, the president has set about obliterating renewable initiatives: halting offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, prohibiting wind and solar from federal land, and eliminating financial support for renewables and electric cars (while providing new public funds to a apparently hopeless effort to revive the coal industry).

“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 the president's initial administration.

“There's a focus 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 rivals, which is detrimental for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with jettisoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, the president has sought to intervene in foreign nations' environmental strategies, criticizing the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not drilling enough petroleum for his liking. He has also pushed the EU to agree to buy $750bn in US oil and gas over the next three years, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with the Asian nation 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 last month. “If you don't distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your nation is going to decline. You need secure boundaries and conventional power if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

Trump has attempted to reshape terminology around power and environment, too. The leader, who was seemingly radicalised by his aversion at seeing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called wind energy “unattractive”, “disgusting” and “inadequate”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has eliminated or hidden inconvenient climate research, deleted mentions of global warming from official sites and produced an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite Trump's claimed support for free speech, compiled a list of prohibited phrases, such as “decarbonisation”, “environmentally friendly”, “pollutants” and “eco-friendly”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

Fossil fuels, in contrast, have been renamed. “I've established a small directive in the executive mansion,” the president confided to the UN. “Never use the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn't it?”

All of this has hindered the implementation of clean energy in the US: in the initial six months of the year, spooked companies terminated or reduced more than $22 billion in clean energy projects, costing more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in Republican-held districts.

Power costs are increasing for Americans 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 confusing even on Trump's own terms, analysts have said. The president has spoken of making American energy “leading” and of the need for employment and additional capacity 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 American energy dominance you need to deploy, establish, deploy,” said Abraham Silverman, an power analyst at Johns Hopkins University.

“It's confusing and very strange to say renewable energy has zero place in the US grid when these are frequently the fastest and most affordable options. A genuine contradiction 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 geopolitical struggle with the Asian nation, contrasting approaches are being touted to the rest of the world: one that remains hooked to the fossil fuels touted by the planet's largest fossil fuel exporter, or one that transitions to renewable technology, likely manufactured overseas.

“Trump repeatedly humiliates the US on the world platform and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” said a former climate advisor, the previous lead environmental consultant to the previous administration.

McCarthy believes that American cities and states 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 regions from cutting pollution. But from China's perspective, the race to shape energy, and thereby alter the general direction of this century, may have concluded.

“The final opportunity for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a Asian environmental specialist at the research organization, of Trump's dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act, the previous president's environmental law. “Domestically, this isn't considered like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim