🔗 Share this article

Half a dozen years following the president reportedly penned a suggestive greeting to the financier, the sitting American leader put his name to something that now seems equally surprising: a letter calling for action on the environmental emergency.

Back in 2009, Trump, then a property magnate and reality TV personality, was part of a group of corporate executives behind a full-page advertisement urging laws to “control climate change, an urgent issue confronting the United States and the world today”. The US must lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “disastrous and irreversible consequences for mankind and our world”.

Nowadays, the document is striking. The globe continues to dawdle in policy in its reaction to the climate crisis but renewable power is expanding, responsible for nearly every additional power generation and drawing double the investment of traditional energy worldwide. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now observe, has shifted.

Most notably, though, the president has become the world's leading proponent of carbon-based energy, throwing the power of the American leadership into a defensive fight to keep the world mired in the age of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer individual adversary to the collective effort to stave off climate breakdown than Trump.

As global representatives convene for international environmental negotiations in the coming weeks, the increase of Trump's opposition towards environmental measures will be evident. The US state department's division that deals with climate negotiations has been abolished as “redundant”, making it uncertain who, if anyone, will speak for the planet's foremost economic and defense global power in Belem.

As in his initial presidency, Trump has again pulled out the US from the Paris climate deal, opened up more territories for fossil fuel extraction, and set about removing pollution controls that would have prevented thousands of deaths throughout the nation. These reversals will “deal a blow through the heart of the environmental movement”, as Lee Zeldin, the president's head of the Environmental Protection Agency, enthusiastically put it.

However the administration's current term in the White House has gone even further, to radical measures that have astonished many onlookers.

Rather than simply support a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his election campaign, the president has begun obliterating clean energy projects: stopping ocean-based turbines that had already been approved, prohibiting renewable energy from federal land, and removing subsidies for renewables and electric cars (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 first Trump administration,” said Kim Carnahan, who was the chief climate negotiator for the US during Trump's first term.

“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 not good for the United States.”

Unsatisfied with jettisoning Republican economic principles in the American power sector, the president has attempted involvement in foreign nations' climate policies, criticizing the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not extracting enough oil for his preference. He has also pushed the EU to consent to purchase $750 billion in US oil and gas over the coming 36 months, as well as striking carbon energy agreements with the Asian nation and the Korean peninsula.

“Countries are on the edge of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” the president told unresponsive leaders during a international address last month. “Unless you distance yourselves from this green scam, your country is going to decline. You need secure boundaries and traditional energy sources if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

Trump has attempted to reshape language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his disgust at viewing renewable generators from his overseas property in 2011, has called wind energy “ugly”, “disgusting” and “pathetic”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “falsehood”.

The government has cut or concealed inconvenient climate research, removed references of global warming from official sites and created an flawed report in their place and even, despite the president's claimed support for free speech, compiled a inventory of banned terms, such as “decarbonisation”, “sustainable”, “emissions” and “green”. The simple documentation of carbon output is now verboten, too.

Carbon energy, in contrast, have been rebranded. “I have a small directive in the White House,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Avoid using the word ‘coal’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. Sounds much better, doesn't it?”

These actions has hindered the implementation of clean energy in the US: in the initial six months of the year, concerned businesses closed or downscaled more than $22bn in clean energy projects, eliminating more than sixteen thousand positions, most of them in conservative areas.

Energy prices are rising for US citizens as a consequence; and the US's global warming pollutants, while continuing to decline, are expected to slow their current reduction rate in the coming period.

This agenda is confusing even on Trump's own terms, analysts have said. Trump has spoken of making American energy “dominant” and of the necessity for employment and new generation to power AI data centers, and yet has undermined this by trying to eliminate clean energy.

“I find it difficult with this – if you are serious about American energy dominance you need to implement, deploy, deploy,” said Abraham Silverman, an energy expert at the academic institution.

“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 most affordable options. There's a real tension in the government's main messages.”

The US government's abandonment of environmental issues raises broader questions about America's place in the global community, too. In the international competition with China, contrasting approaches are being touted to the global community: one that remains hooked to the traditional energy touted by the planet's largest fossil fuel exporter, or one that shifts to clean energy components, probably made in China.

“The president continues to embarrass the US on the world platform and undermine the interests of US citizens at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the former top climate adviser 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 local authorities will continue to evolve, even if Trump tries to halt states from cutting pollution. But from China's perspective, the race to shape energy, and thereby change the overall trajectory of this era, may have concluded.

“The final opportunity for the US to join the green bandwagon has departed,” said a China analyst, a Asian environmental specialist at the research organization, of the administration's dismantling of the climate legislation, Biden's signature climate bill. “Domestically, this isn't considered like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim