Members of the European Parliament flew 5,000 miles to Florida this summer to meet with the head of a U.S. climate denial group, DeSmog can reveal.

Freedom Party of Austria’s Harald Vilimsky and Alternative for Germany (AfD) MEP Markus Buchheit, vocal critics of EU climate policy in their respective far-right parties, met with James Taylor, the president of the Heartland Institute, one day apart in July in Tampa, Florida.

It comes after DeSmog and The Guardian revealed in January how Heartland, which has for decades been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man made climate change, had attempted to scupper major EU climate reforms by forging alliances with far-right politicians.

The lobby group, which has received funding from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil, calls itself “the leading global think tank countering climate alarmism”. Heartland has backed Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and his rollback on Biden-era clean energy projects. Taylor himself has described the climate crisis as a “sham”.

“It is a scandal that MEPs like Harald Vilimsky are jetting to the U.S. in the middle of the climate crisis to meet with the world’s loudest climate deniers,” Lena Schilling, an MEP with the Austrian Greens Party, told DeSmog.

News of the MEPs’ recent meetings follows growing concerns around the influence of Heartland on European politics, as climate policy in Brussels faces a major backlash from the right.

The opinions expressed by Heartland and its representatives are starkly at odds with the findings of climate scientists, who are almost unanimous in their agreement that climate change is caused by humans, primarily through the burning of oil, gas and coal.

2024 was the hottest year on record globally. Temperatures in Tampa, where the meetings with Heartland were held, reached a high of 100°F (37.8C) in late July for the first time since records began in 1890. Experts said human-caused climate change made Florida’s heatwave five times more likely.

“These meetings are deeply worrying,” said Olivier Hoedeman of the pro-transparency pressure group Corporate Europe Observatory, “because they confirm the close cooperation between far-right MEPs and a U.S. climate denialist think tank that has close links to the Trump administration.”

Heartland, Vilimsky, Buchheit and Taylor did not respond to DeSmog’s requests for clarification and comment.

‘Dangerous Closeness’

Vilimsky has been a major player in Heartland’s plans to spread climate science denial in Europe. He and Buchheit have both used their platforms to attack the Green Deal, the EU’s plan to reach climate neutrality by 2050.

As revealed by DeSmog earlier this year, Vilimsky attended Heartland’s International Conference on Climate Change in Orlando, Florida, in 2023, before he and Austrian MEP Roman Haider visited the think tank’s offices to request help “to counter climate alarmism”. Heartland president Taylor was then invited to speak at the European Parliament, where he reportedly forged links with Hungarian politicians in an attempt to thwart climate policy.

Only two other MEPs, Buchheit and Polish politician Marcin Sypniewski, who both sit with the far-right Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN), have officially met with Heartland since last year’s European elections, according to the Integrity Watch EU lobbying register. In contrast, this was Vilimsky’s sixth meeting with the Heartland Institute, and his eighth since 2019.

Vilimsky, who leads the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) delegation in the European Parliament, has voted against the ratification of the Paris Agreement. He has called the EU Green Deal “eco totalitarianism” and has claimed its supporters are the “eco Taliban”.

The FPÖ is known for its Eurosceptic, anti-migration, pro-Kremlin stance. Founded in 1956, the party was first led by a former SS officer and Nazi lawmaker, and its latest election manifesto called for the “remigration of unninvited foreigners”. Earlier this year, the FPÖ dismissed a government-commissioned report linking the party to right-wing extremist networks as “pseudoscientific” and “politically motivated”.

Vilimsky has also frequently expressed support for the far-right AfD, and appears regularly at party events. The AfD, now the second largest grouping in the German parliament, was this year classified as extreme-right by Germany’s intelligence agency, which described the “ethnicity- and ancestry-based understanding” of AfD members as “incompatible with the free democratic order”.

Heartland’s influence is also visible in the UK, where a UK/EU branch opened in London in December. Politico reported last week how Lois Perry, the head of the new branch, said she was influencing Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK “at the highest level.” Perry has previously described CO2 as “vital for life” and human-caused climate change as “a bit of a stretch”.

A number of other anti-climate U.S. groups have also been active in the EU in the past year — among them the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, a radical right-wing blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term. DeSmog reported how, in March, Heritage brought together hardline conservative groups in Washington D.C. to hear how they would “dismantle” the EU.

Campaigners have pointed out that the MEPs’ July meeting with Heartland took place just a week after an MEP from the Patriots for Europe grouping — of which Vilimsky is the vice chair — was put in charge of leading Parliament’s talks on the EU’s 2040 climate milestone. 

“While Europe is negotiating its climate target, the FPÖ and AfD are sitting at the table taking advice from Trump-linked think tanks that have spent years fighting the Paris Agreement,” commented Schilling, of the Austrian Greens.

“This dangerous closeness between Europe’s far right and the American climate denial lobby shows one thing clearly: they are not working for the people of Europe, but for the interests of the oil and gas industry,” Schilling added. “Anyone who allies with the gravediggers of the Paris Agreement is a threat to our future.”

Additional research by Sam Bright and Clare Carlile

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