Donald Trump is the “biggest loser we’ve seen in a long time” for scrapping action on the climate crisis and ceding the clean energy race to China, former US secretary of state John Kerry has said.

Kerry, speaking at the Cop31 climate summit in Turkey, criticized Trump for withdrawing the US from the international climate process and axing measures that reduced planet-heating emissions. Unlike almost all other countries in the world, the Trump administration has sent no delegation to the resort city of Antalya for the annual UN climate talks, which started on Monday.

The US president, who has previously called climate science a “hoax” and called for countries to drill for more oil and gas, again expressed his hostility towards clean energy on Monday. “I will not approve wind turbines because wind turbines are a major loser,” Trump, who has long-held animus towards wind farms, said about potential new legislation that would make it easier to build new energy projects.

Asked about his comments by the Guardian, Kerry said: “[The] first thing they should do is hold up a really big mirror so he can look at a loser, because he’s the biggest loser we’ve seen in a long time on all of these issues.”

“He’s missing the point,” Kerry, a former climate envoy for Joe Biden’s administration, added. “He’s missing the competitiveness with China. He’s missing the marketplace for goods that could be produced in the United States. We could be the supply chain for some of these.”

Under Biden, the US passed sweeping climate legislation that gave tax breaks for clean energy and electric vehicle manufacturing in a bid to compete with China, which has dominated clean tech.

Republicans eliminated most of this support, however, with Trump instead imposing tariffs on various goods and pouring public money into propping up struggling coal-fired power plants. Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, causing much of the pollution that is dangerously overheating our planet.

“He declared he wanted to beat China, be number one in X, Y, or Z, and he walked away from the battlefield,” Kerry said of Trump. “He totally took America out of that sector. So honestly, if you want to be number one, you don’t do it by literally blackballing an entire sector of the economy.”

Kerry, who ran as the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, has repeatedly urged the US and the rest of the world to follow China’s lead on green energy. The overall rapid growth in renewables has helped prevent a significant amount of fossil fuel power going online, with global emissions edging down slightly last year.

Far larger and deeper cuts to emissions will be needed for the world to avoid catastrophic climate change, however, with countries gathering at Cop told by António Guterres, the UN secretary general, it was “long past time” to phase out fossil fuel use.

The dawdling progress in years of talks to even discuss fossil fuels, the central cause of the climate crisis, has provoked ire from advocates. “Cops have become greenwashed circuses,” said Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who arrived in Antalya on Tuesday. “That is the reality.”

Kerry acknowledged the ponderous progress and that politicians should talk differently about the climate crisis to engage the public. But he claimed that while it was not the central issue to the recent US midterm elections, concerns about global heating did overlap with alarm over rising energy costs and drove voters to the Democrats.

“I think we will have a number of candidates who will have this high on the agenda,” Kerry said of the victorious Democratic candidates. “And all of the analysis that I’ve seen, I mean real analysis, has said this was one of the issues that counted.”

The White House has dismissed the Cop 31 talks. “This summit rejects reality by failing to acknowledge that extremist climate policies are destroying countries around the world,” a White House official said, confirming that the administration would not send anyone to Cop31.