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Half a dozen years following the president reportedly wrote a suggestive birthday note to the financier, the current US president signed to something that now appears almost as shocking: a letter demanding measures on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, the businessman, then a property magnate and television star, was among a group of corporate executives behind a large ad urging legislation to “control climate change, an urgent issue facing the United States and the world today”. The US must take the forefront on renewable power, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and irreversible consequences for mankind and our planet”.

Nowadays, the document is jarring. The world still delays in policy in its reaction to the climate crisis but renewable power is expanding, accounting for almost all additional power generation and drawing twice the funding of fossil fuels worldwide. The economy, as those business leaders from 2009 would now observe, has shifted.

Most starkly, though, Trump has become the planet's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, directing the power of the US presidency into a defensive fight to maintain the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no stronger individual adversary to the unified attempt to stave off environmental collapse than the current administration.

When world leaders gather for international environmental negotiations next month, the escalation of the administration's opposition towards environmental measures will be apparent. The US state department's office that handles environmental talks has been abolished as “redundant”, making it uncertain which representatives, should any attend, will represent the world's leading financial and military superpower in the upcoming talks.

Similar to his initial presidency, Trump has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more territories for fossil fuel extraction, and begun removing clean air protections that would have avoided thousands of deaths throughout the nation. These reversals will “drive a stake through the heart of the climate change religion”, as the EPA head, the president's leader of the Environmental Protection Agency, enthusiastically put it.

But Trump's latest spell in the White House has gone even further, to radical measures that have astonished many onlookers.

Instead of simply boost a carbon energy sector that contributed significantly to his political race, the president has begun obliterating renewable initiatives: halting offshore windfarms that had already been approved, prohibiting renewable energy from government property, and eliminating subsidies for renewables and zero-emission vehicles (while providing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile effort to revive coal).

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

“There's a focus on dismantling rather than construction. It's difficult to witness. We're not present for a major global issue and are ceding that position to our rivals, which is detrimental for the United States.”

Not content with jettisoning conservative free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, the president has attempted involvement in foreign nations' environmental strategies, scolding the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not extracting enough oil for his preference. He has also pushed the EU to agree to buy $750bn in American fossil fuels over the next three years, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with Japan and the Korean peninsula.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” Trump told stony-faced officials during a international address recently. “If you don't distance yourselves from this environmental fraud, your country is going to fail. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

The president has tried to rewire language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was seemingly radicalised by his aversion at seeing wind turbines from his overseas property in 2011, has called turbine power “ugly”, “repulsive” and “inadequate”. The climate crisis is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has eliminated or hidden 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 claimed support for free speech, drawn up a inventory of prohibited phrases, such as “decarbonisation”, “environmentally friendly”, “emissions” and “green”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

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

These actions has slowed the implementation of renewable power in the US: in the first half of the year, concerned businesses terminated or reduced more than $22 billion in renewable initiatives, eliminating more than 16,000 jobs, most of them in Republican-held districts.

Energy prices are rising for Americans as a consequence; and the US's planet-heating emissions, while continuing to decline, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the years ahead.

These policies is confusing even on Trump's own terms, experts have said. The president has spoken of making American energy “leading” and of the necessity for employment and new generation to power technology infrastructure, and yet has undercut this by attempting to stamp out clean energy.

“I find it difficult with this – if you are genuine about US power leadership you need to deploy, establish, deploy,” said an energy specialist, an power analyst at Johns Hopkins University.

“It's puzzling and very strange to say wind and solar has no role in the US grid when these are frequently the quickest and cheapest options. A genuine contradiction in the government's main messages.”

America's abandonment of climate concerns prompts broader questions about America's place in the world, too. In the international competition with the Asian nation, two very different visions are being touted to the global community: one that remains hooked to the traditional energy advocated by the planet's largest fossil fuel exporter, or one that transitions to renewable technology, probably manufactured overseas.

“The president continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the former lead environmental consultant to Joe Biden.

The expert believes that local governments dedicated to climate action can help to fill the void left by the national administration. Economies and sub-national governments will continue to evolve, even if the administration tries to halt regions from cutting pollution. But from the Asian nation's perspective, the competition to influence power, and thereby alter the general direction of this era, may already be over.

“The last chance for the US to join the renewable movement has left the station,” said a China analyst, a China climate policy expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of the administration's dismantling of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's signature climate bill. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim