🔗 Share this article

Half a dozen years following Donald Trump reportedly penned a suggestive greeting to Jeffrey Epstein, the sitting US president signed to something that now seems almost as shocking: a letter calling for measures on the environmental emergency.

In 2009, Trump, then a property magnate and television star, was part of a coalition of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement calling for laws to “address climate change, an immediate challenge confronting the United States and the planet today”. The US needs to lead on renewable power, the signatories wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible effects for mankind and our planet”.

Today, the letter is striking. The globe continues to dawdle in policy in its response to the climate crisis but renewable power is expanding, accounting for almost all additional power generation and drawing double the investment of traditional energy worldwide. The economy, as those executives from 2009 would now observe, has changed.

Most notably, though, the president has become the planet's foremost advocate of fossil fuels, directing the power of the US presidency into a rearguard battle to keep the world stuck in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no stronger single opponent to the unified attempt to stave off environmental collapse than Trump.

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

As in his first term, the administration has again pulled out the US from the Paris climate deal, thrown open more land and waters for fossil fuel extraction, and begun removing clean air protections that would have avoided numerous fatalities across America. These rollbacks will “deal a blow through the core of the climate change religion”, as the EPA head, Trump's leader of the environmental regulator, gleefully put it.

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

Rather than simply support a fossil fuel industry that contributed significantly to his political race, the president has set about eliminating renewable initiatives: halting offshore windfarms that had previously authorized, banning renewable energy from federal land, and eliminating financial support for renewables and electric cars (while handing fresh taxpayer dollars to a seemingly futile attempt to restore coal).

“We are certainly 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.

“The emphasis on dismantlement rather than building. It's difficult to witness. We're absent for a significant worldwide concern and are ceding that ground to our rivals, which is not good for the United States.”

Not content with abandoning Republican economic principles in the US energy market, the president has sought to intervene in foreign nations' climate policies, scolding the UK for erecting renewable generators and for not extracting enough petroleum for his liking. He has also pressured the EU to consent to buy $750bn in US oil and gas over the next three years, as well as striking fossil fuel deals with Japan and South Korea.

“Nations are on the edge of destruction because of the green energy agenda,” the president told stony-faced officials during a international address last month. “If you don't distance yourselves from this green scam, your country is going to fail. You need strong borders and traditional energy sources if you are going to be prosperous once more.”

Trump has tried to rewire language around energy and climate, too. Trump, who was apparently influenced by his aversion at viewing renewable generators from his Scottish golf course in 2011, has called turbine power “unattractive”, “disgusting” and “pathetic”. The environmental emergency is, in his words, a “hoax”.

His administration has eliminated or hidden unfavorable environmental studies, removed references of global warming from official sites and produced an error-strewn study in their place and even, despite Trump's claimed support for open dialogue, compiled a inventory of banned terms, such as “carbon reduction”, “sustainable”, “pollutants” and “green”. The mere reporting of greenhouse gas emissions is now verboten, too.

Fossil fuels, meanwhile, have been renamed. “I've established a small directive in the executive mansion,” Trump revealed to the UN. “Never use the word ‘the mineral’, only use the words ‘environmentally attractive carbon fuel’. Sounds much better, doesn't it?”

These actions has hindered the implementation of renewable power in the US: in the first half of the year, spooked businesses closed or downscaled more than $22 billion in clean energy projects, eliminating more than 16,000 jobs, primarily in Republican-held districts.

Energy prices are increasing for Americans as a consequence; and the US's global warming pollutants, while continuing to decline, are expected to slow their current reduction rate in the years ahead.

These policies is confusing even on Trump's stated objectives, analysts have said. The president has discussed making US power “dominant” and of the need for jobs and additional capacity to power AI data centers, and yet has undercut this by trying to eliminate renewables.

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

“It's puzzling and quite unusual to say renewable energy has zero place in the American system when these are often the fastest and cheapest options. There's a real tension in the administration's primary statements.”

America's neglect of climate concerns prompts broader questions about the US position in the global community, too. In the international competition with China, two very different visions are being touted to the global community: 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, probably made in China.

“Trump continues to embarrass the US on the world platform and weaken the interests of US citizens at home,” said Gina McCarthy, the previous lead environmental consultant to Joe Biden.

McCarthy believes that local governments committed to climate action can help to fill the void left by the federal government. Economies and sub-national governments will continue to evolve, even if Trump tries to stop regions from reducing emissions. But from the Asian nation's perspective, the competition to influence power, and thereby change the general direction of this era, may have concluded.

“The last chance for the US to jump on the green bandwagon has departed,” said Li Shuo, a China climate policy expert at the research organization, of Trump's dismemberment of the Inflation Reduction Act, the previous president's environmental law. “In China, this isn't considered like a rivalry. The US is {just not|sim