A year ago, as the world convulsed from Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, his allies were already identifying their next frontier.
In December, the Heartland Institute hosted a private event in Mayfair, one of London’s wealthiest areas, to announce the launch of its new UK-Europe branch.
The launch was attended by former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss and current shadow trade and business secretary Andrew Griffith, with Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as the star speaker.
The Heartland Institute is proudly one of the world’s foremost climate science denial groups, with extensive ties to the Trump administration. It contributed to Project 2025 – the blueprint for Trump’s second term, drafted by the Heritage Foundation.
Heartland’s new wing would be led by one of Farage’s old friends – Lois Perry, herself a former leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), like Farage – and a familiar presence on the right-wing media circuit. On social media, she still calls Farage her “boss”.
A press release for the event said Perry would “leverage Heartland’s science-based work pushing back at climate alarmism and schemes such as net zero from London where she can communicate directly with policymakers in the UK and the continent”.
DeSmog has been tracking Perry and the Heartland Institute’s activities over the past year, compiling a new map to show how the group has been attempting to exert its influence in the UK and Europe.
Hover and click to navigate the interactive map.
The Farage Alliance
Perry has used Farage and his insurgent political project as an important UK bridgehead.
Reform echoes Heartland’s anti-climate politics. The party campaigns to scrap net zero targets, end subsidies for renewable energy, lift the fracking ban, and open new coal power plants.
Farage has claimed it’s “absolutely nuts” for CO2 to be considered a pollutant, despite admitting: “I can’t tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not”.
The Reform leader has spoken at three Heartland Institute events in the last 18 months: a fundraising dinner in Chicago in September 2024, the launch of its UK-EU wing in London that December, and an event on energy policy in London in June 2025.
The latter was hosted by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s leading climate science denial group, which has claimed that “carbon dioxide has been mercilessly demonised” when in fact it is a “benefit to the planet”.
At the benefit in Chicago, Farage called for more fossil fuel extraction and for Heartland to “set up in Britain and Europe”. He got his wish with the founding of Heartland UK-Europe that December.
Farage also returned the favour, by inviting Heartland to speak at Reform’s annual conference this year, where the group hosted a panel entitled “Is Climate Realism Inevitable?”.
The event featured Lois Perry, Heartland president James Taylor, representatives of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and Taxpayers’ Alliance – two anti-climate think tanks – and former UKIP politician Christopher Monckton, who has called climate change “bullshit”.
On the panel, Taylor reportedly said: “The reality is this: we’re not facing a climate crisis”, while Perry claimed that policies to cut emissions are designed “to control us… to tax us…. to take our money and to take our liberty.”
During the conference, Heartland confirmed to Politico that it had “held conversations with policymakers within Reform” and was advising the party.
As DeSmog revealed, 92 percent of Reform’s donations between the 2019 and 2024 general elections came from climate science deniers, fossil fuel interests, or major polluters – a total of £2.3 million.
The party’s treasurer, Nick Candy, has claimed he’s attempting to raise funds from oil executives.
European Lobbying
Heartland has also been working with far-right parties across Europe in an attempt to undermine the continent’s climate policies.
The group has been engaged in this task for some time – even before the launch of its European branch last December.
As DeSmog and The Guardian revealed, Heartland has bragged on its website about working with Austrian politicians Harald Vilimsky and Roman Haider of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) to spread its message across the continent.
This included encouraging Hungarian lawmakers to pull their support for the Nature Restoration Law, which set targets for restoring Europe’s degraded ecosystems, habitats and species. Despite Heartland’s lobbying, the legislation eventually passed in June 2024.
Vilimsky was also a speaker at Heartland’s fundraising event in Chicago with Nigel Farage. The Austrian used the platform to call on a future Trump administration to form closer ties with autocratic Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Heartland claims that, in October 2024, it met with former Polish prime minister Beata Szydlo of the right-wing Law and Justice Party, along with the Polish trade union Solidarity, to attack the EU’s green policies and promote continued coal power.
Taylor reportedly gave a presentation during the visit arguing that “climate activists are defying sound science and imposing devastating impacts on affordable energy, agriculture, the environment, and individual freedom in Poland and throughout the world.”
In brief: Lois Perry
Perry founded CAR26 – a climate science denial lobby group that has questioned whether carbon dioxide is a “significant factor in global warming”.
In August 2022, during a record heatwave in the UK, Perry declared: “I don’t believe man-made global warming is a thing.” At the 2021 COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, she was filmed outside the conference shouting that the climate crisis is a “con” designed by “elites” to make people poor and hungry.
From May to June 2024, Perry was the leader of UKIP, an anti-immigration party previously led by Nigel Farage.
This lobbying campaign has accelerated throughout 2025 with the launch of Heartland UK-EU.
In particular, the group has targeted the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), a new law designed to require companies operating in the bloc – including foreign firms – to protect human rights and the environment across their supply chains.
As DeSmog reported, Heartland and its allies in Trump’s political ecosystem set out to water down the law or – even better – destroy it, declaring: “The CSDDD is the greatest threat to America’s sovereignty since the fall of the Soviet Union.”
In April, the Heartland published an open letter signed by 31 groups, calling for the Trump administration to “take immediate steps to counter the CSDDD’s implementation”, including “if necessary, imposing retaliatory trade policies that punish EU nations for eroding America’s sovereignty, freedoms, and prosperity.”
As revealed by the research group SOMO, U.S. fossil fuel companies have also lobbied aggressively against this legislation.
This pressure appears to have been successful, with the EU deciding to limit the scope and delay the implementation of the CSDDD and the accompanying Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
Heartland and its allies have also racked up the air miles in their attempts to influence European politics.
In May, Taylor and Perry attended CPAC events in Hungary and Poland alongside key Trump supporters – including his own head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem.
Taylor claimed that he “met with some very influential people at the top of the Law and Justice party” during CPAC Poland, while Perry said they “made some extraordinary progress in Poland and Hungary and some massive connections”.
In September, the FPÖ’s Vilimsky and Markus Buchheit, a Member of European Parliament (MEP) from Germany’s far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), flew to Tampa, Florida, for a meeting with Taylor.
This was Vilimsky’s sixth meeting with Heartland since 2024’s European Parliament elections, and his eighth since 2019, according to the Integrity Watch EU lobbying register.
However, Heartland’s UK-EU branch has been far from a resounding success.
Not a single meeting with Perry has been logged by an MEP this year, while she promised to host a “big big big event” in Poland in November “to really challenge the whole net zero concept in terms of specifically for agriculture” – an event that seemingly did not materialise.
Vilimsky also said that he was planning on hosting a Heartland conference in spring 2025. There is no evidence of it taking place.
And, in the UK, Heartland allowed its Reform conference event to be sponsored by a small British-Pakistani outlet, Quews News, on which Perry has a show. The founder of Quews News, Sohail Qureshi, stated in a YouTube video on 8 July that Reform leader Nigel Farage is spreading “a very far-right, very anti-immigrant, anti-[Islam], anti-Pakistan rhetoric”.
Perry has not made another appearance on the platform since DeSmog published this story in October.
In brief: The Heartland Institute
Founded in 1984, Heartland has described itself as “the world’s most prominent think tank supporting skepticism about man-made climate change”.
The group originally worked with tobacco giant Philip Morris to deny the harms caused by smoking.
Heartland received at least $676,000 between 1998 and 2007 from U.S. oil giant ExxonMobil, while it received $50,000 between 1997 and 2014 from foundations linked to Koch Industries – a fossil fuel giant and leading sponsor of climate science denial.
The Heartland Institute previously told DeSmog that it ”stands resolute in its mission to advance sound science, economic prosperity, and individual liberty”. It added that “our support comes from a diverse array of individuals and organisations who share our vision for a freer, more prosperous world.”
On Heartland’s podcast in February, Perry claimed the group has “very strong affiliations” with “certain big individuals” in Trump’s team. “Heartland has been extremely influential in helping to shape policy at the highest level… under Trump’s administration, and in other Republican administrations,” she said.
This article was produced with the support of the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF). The sole responsibility for any content supported by the EMIF lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute.
