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Half a dozen years after Donald Trump reportedly penned a suggestive birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting American leader signed to something that now appears equally surprising: a document demanding measures on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, the businessman, then a property magnate and reality TV personality, was among a coalition of business leaders behind a large ad calling for laws to “control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the planet today”. The US must take the forefront on clean energy, the signatories wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible consequences for mankind and our planet”.

Nowadays, the document is striking. The world continues to dawdle politically in its response to the environmental emergency but renewable power is booming, accounting for almost all additional power generation and drawing twice the funding of traditional energy globally. The market, as those business leaders from 2009 would now observe, has changed.

Most notably, though, the president has become the planet's leading proponent of fossil fuels, directing the power of the American leadership into a defensive fight to keep the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the unified attempt to prevent climate breakdown than Trump.

When world leaders convene for international environmental negotiations next month, the increase of Trump's hostility towards climate action will be evident. The American diplomatic corps' division that handles climate negotiations has been abolished as “redundant”, making it uncertain which representatives, should any attend, will represent the world's leading economic and military global power in the upcoming talks.

As in his first term, the administration has again withdrawn the US from the Paris climate deal, opened up more land and waters for oil and gas drilling, and begun removing pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths across America. These reversals will “drive a stake through the core of the environmental movement”, as the EPA head, the president's leader of the environmental regulator, enthusiastically put it.

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

Rather than simply support a fossil fuel industry that donated handsomely to his political race, the president has set about eliminating clean energy projects: stopping offshore windfarms that had already been approved, banning renewable energy from government property, and removing financial support for renewables and zero-emission vehicles (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile effort to revive the coal industry).

“We are certainly in a changed situation than we were in the first Trump administration,” said a former climate negotiator, who was the lead environmental diplomat for the US during the president's first term.

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

Unsatisfied with abandoning Republican free-market orthodoxy in the US energy market, Trump has sought to intervene in other countries' climate policies, scolding the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not drilling enough petroleum for his preference. He has also pressured the EU to consent to buy $750bn in US oil and gas over the coming 36 months, as well as concluding carbon energy agreements with Japan and South Korea.

“Nations are on the edge of collapse because of the green energy agenda,” the president told stony-faced officials during a international address last month. “Unless you get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. You need secure boundaries and conventional power if you are going to be great again.”

The president has attempted to reshape terminology around energy and climate, too. The leader, who was seemingly radicalised by his disgust at seeing wind turbines from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called turbine power “unattractive”, “disgusting” and “pathetic”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “hoax”.

The government has eliminated or hidden inconvenient climate research, removed mentions of climate change from government websites and produced an error-strewn study in their stead and even, despite Trump's claimed support for free speech, compiled a inventory of banned terms, such as “carbon reduction”, “environmentally friendly”, “emissions” and “green”. The simple documentation of greenhouse gas emissions is now forbidden, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been rebranded. “I've established a small directive in the executive mansion,” the president confided to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn't it?”

All of this has hindered the adoption of renewable power in the US: in the initial six months of the year, spooked businesses closed or downscaled more than $22 billion in renewable initiatives, costing more than 16,000 jobs, most of them in conservative areas.

Energy prices are increasing for Americans as a result; and the US's global warming pollutants, while still falling, are expected to worsen their already sluggish descent in the years ahead.

This agenda is confusing even on Trump's own terms, analysts have said. The president has spoken of making US power “dominant” and of the necessity for jobs and new generation to power technology infrastructure, and yet has undermined this by trying to eliminate renewables.

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

“It's puzzling and very strange to say wind and solar has zero place in the US grid when these are often the quickest and cheapest options. A genuine contradiction in the administration's main messages.”

America's abandonment of climate concerns prompts larger inquiries 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 fossil fuel exporter, or one that shifts to clean energy components, probably made in China.

“Trump continues to embarrass the US on the global stage and undermine the concerns of US citizens at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the former top climate adviser to the previous administration.

McCarthy believes that local governments committed to climate action can help to fill the void left by the national administration. Markets and sub-national governments will continue to evolve, even if the administration tries to stop states from cutting pollution. But from China's perspective, the competition to influence power, and thereby alter the overall trajectory of this era, may already be over.

“The final opportunity for the US to join the renewable movement has departed,” said Li Shuo, a Asian environmental specialist at the Asia Society Policy Institute, of Trump's dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's environmental law. “Domestically, this isn't even treated like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim