Opposition to climate action was rife at a recent conference in Budapest, Hungary, attended by key hard-right, nationalist figures from the UK, U.S., and Europe.

The two-day event on 17 and 18 September, co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation, played host to high-ranking members of Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government, executives from anti-green think tanks, and UK politicians. 

Speakers claimed that the climate movement is now a “religion”, and that emissions reductions policies are damaging the “economic strength and the social cohesion of the West”.

The Heritage Foundation is an ultra-conservative group that authored the controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a second Donald Trump term, which proposes replacing green investment with the further deregulation of the oil and gas industry. 

The event was co-hosted alongside the Danube Institute – a Hungarian think tank supportive of Viktor Orbán, that has received funding from his government via the non-profit Batthyány Lajos Foundation (BLA). 

It featured a keynote address from Conservative peer and former Cabinet Office minister Lord David Frost, a director of the UK’s leading climate science denial group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). 

Though Lord Frost’s speech focused on geopolitical rivalries and the health of global democracy, it also touched on climate change. He claimed that “net zero controls on lifestyles” are helping to create a “worrying” form of “political collectivism” that allows for the expansion of government into social and economic life. 

He also claimed that, in the West, we are “dismantling our energy systems while our geopolitical rivals are doing no such thing”. 

In reality, clean energy was China’s top driver of economic growth in 2023, with the country’s $890 billion investment being almost as large as global investments in fossil fuel supply during the year. 

Lord Frost and many of the other speakers praised Hungary’s nationalist administration, lauding its attempts to preserve “national culture” and defend its “sovereignty”, despite Orbán’s authoritarian record, which has involved giving his ministers powers to interfere in the judiciary, and increasing state control over the media.

Lord Frost was joined at the conference by former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, a GWPF director and a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute. Asked what political issues across the world keep him up at night, Abbott said: “there are dreadful internal challenges particularly around the climate and emissions obsessions which are doing so much to damage the economic strength and the social cohesion of the West.”

Abbott said that he is “not part of the Trump fan club” but that “he was a better president than his predecessor [Barack Obama] and a much better president than his successor [Joe Biden]”.

He added that Trump would be a “transformational president” during his second term, if he was successful in trying to “cut taxes, to cut regulation, to boost defence, to get out of all the climate, cultish things, to try to drive the woke mind virus out of educational institutions, [and] to control the borders”.

As revealed by DeSmog, key Trump ally Robert Wilkie – who served as U.S. veterans’ affairs secretary from 2018 to 2021 – used the Danube-Heritage event to confirm that his former boss would “kill” climate budgets if he’s elected for a second term. 

Until August, Abbott served as an advisor to the UK government via its Board of Trade – appointed to the position by the Conservatives in September 2020. Labour leader Keir Starmer said at the time that he had “real concerns” about Abbott’s appointment, and DeSmog understands that he has been stood down from the position, along with all existing members of the board.

Abbott has previously said that “climate change is probably doing good” and has likened climate action to “primitive people… killing goats to appease the volcano gods”.

“It’s very concerning that we have a former British government minister and an ex-Australian prime minister – who let’s not forget until recently was still on a British government body – effectively doing PR for Viktor Orbán and his state-funded think tanks,” said Peter Geoghegan, editor of Democracy for Sale.

‘It’s a Religion’

A number of the speakers at the Budapest summit, which featured groups with financial ties to climate science deniers and the fossil fuel industry, criticised policies designed to limit global emissions. 

The event featured Timothy M. Egan, president of the Canadian Gas Association, the trade group for the country’s natural gas industry. Speaking in a personal capacity, Egan claimed that “the language used with the green agenda is extreme”. 

He added: “We say that we have to achieve net zero – a kind of promised land where everything will operate in perfect balance – but this is the language of religion not commerce and the fervour for it is more cult-like than it is religious.”

Egan said that “our collective enemies” are gaining a strategic advantage due to our “green diversion” and that, as a result, “the risk of even greater suffering for all of us as free citizens will only grow”. 

The assertion that green action is a form of “religion” was a theme throughout the conference. Csaba Gondola, the chief advisor to the Hungarian energy minister, used his address to claim that “it’s a trend; it’s an ideology; it’s a religion”.

Gondola added that climate change is a “matter of science”, but claimed that “you can of course argue about how much individuals are contributing… or if it’s a natural phenomenon.”

Authors working for the world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have said that “it is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet”.

The IPCC has also stated that “climate change impacts will put a disproportionate burden on low-income households and thus increase poverty levels.”

Gondola further claimed that policies to achieve net zero emissions “are really hurting our economies… the whole continent is losing its competitiveness and we have already started to lose jobs… and we see green inflation.”

Viktor Orbán’s government has taken mixed positions on climate action. In 2019, the Hungarian prime minister vetoed the EU’s plans to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, and has dismissed the bloc’s policies to tackle climate change as a “utopian fantasy”.

However, in his 2020 state of the nation address, Orbán called protecting the climate and nature “our Christian and patriotic duty”.

According to Hungary-based climate policy expert István Bart, supporters of Orbán’s Fidesz party “are more likely to be rural – so they can see for themselves how the climate is changing. They have not been brainwashed to not believe their eyes. We also had a huge drought this summer and flooding in September.”

In Bart’s view, the Danube-Heritage conference was therefore “part of Fidesz’s foreign policy outreach”, rather than being intended for a domestic audience that may be more sympathetic to climate action. 

The “event was not reported on at all in Hungarian media, neither in the government-controlled press, nor in the independent media,” he told DeSmog.

The international focus of the event was highlighted by the fact that the new UK Labour government came in for criticism. Ralph Schoellhammer, a visiting fellow at the Hungarian think tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), targeted Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband, who has been a vocal supporter of renewable energy since entering office in July. 

Schoellhammer said that Miliband’s job title was “an oxymoron”, and he compared the role to “being an undertaker and a doctor at the same time”. 

“You would not trust such a person,” Schoellhammer added. 

The Think Tanks

MCC was among a number of conservative, anti-green think tanks that attended the conference in Budapest. 

A well-connected group across Europe and America, MCC “plays a key role” in Hungary’s mission to become “an intellectual powerhouse”, according to Viktor Orbán’s political director Balázs Orbán, who made a keynote speech at the event. 

MCC is financed by oil and gas money, having received more than £1.3 billion in Hungarian state funding in 2020 via a 10 percent stake in the country’s oil and gas giant MOL.

MCC’s shares in MOL were gifted by the Hungarian government, which also awarded MCC a 10 percent stake in the pharmaceutical firm Gedeon Richter, plus $462 million in cash and $9 million in property. 

Through Gedeon Richter and MOL, the think tank was handed shares in two of the country’s three most valuable companies.

MCC is chaired by Balázs Orbán, and its board includes Hungary’s Minister of Culture and Innovation János Csák. According to the investigative outlet Follow The Money, MCC is conservative, nationalist, Eurosceptic, and “plays a key role in spreading the ideology of the Hungarian government”.

As revealed by DeSmog, MCC Brussels – an affiliate of MCC – has played a role in mobilising protests against EU agricultural reforms aimed at reducing the sector’s emissions. DeSmog also revealed that, in April, MCC Brussels helped to organise the National Conservatism conference in the Belgian capital featuring critics of climate action, as well as radical right-wing figures from across Europe.

When asked about the think tank’s funding sources, MCC Brussels executive director Frank Furedi previously told DeSmog that he would be “prepared to take money from the devil, because I think I’ve got enough integrity, that you know, I’m not going to play to their tune.”

Furedi spoke at the Danube-Heritage event along with Schoellhammer, and MCC’s head of geopolitics Attila Demkó. 

Various U.S. pressure groups and think tanks were also represented at the conference. 

They included the Hudson Institute, whose senior fellow Brigham McCown used his address to claim that “we risk unilateral economic disarmament by embracing intermittent and more expensive energy options while other countries unabashedly continue to invest in cheaper alternatives.” 

A spike in the cost of living across the West following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was particularly acute among countries – such as the UK – that relied on gas to heat homes and produce electricity, according to the International Monetary Fund. “The UK energy crisis is a fossil gas crisis,” Sarah Brown at the energy think tank Ember told The Guardian.

Between 2000 and 2018, the Hudson Institute received $151,650 from charities linked to the fossil fuel giant Koch Industries. The brothers behind the company, Charles and the late David Koch, have been the principal funders of climate denial groups in the U.S. since the 1980s. 

The event also featured speakers from the Heritage Foundation: fellow Jim Carafano, who was part of Trump’s first term transition team, and visiting fellow Nathan Lavine, who holds the same title at the Danube Institute. 

Kenneth Haar, a researcher and campaigner at the transparency campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory, told DeSmog: “The conference in Budapest was another step for the Trump camp in forging links with like-minded European groups. And should Trump be re-elected, they could become very influential in Europe.”

Haar warned that these groups could “wreak havoc” if Trump returns to the White House – particularly given the growing presence of far-right parties in the European Parliament. 

The Heritage Foundation is behind Project 2025 – a 920-page plan to rapidly “reform” the U.S. government by shuttering bureaus and offices, overturning regulations, and replacing thousands of public sector employees with hand-picked political allies of Trump.

It also proposes a range of radical anti-climate policies, including slashing restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrapping investment in renewable energy, and gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. 

At least 140 authors of Project 2025 worked for the last Trump administration, according to CNN, while several are expected to hold positions in the next Trump White House, if he wins the election. 

However, Trump has attempted to distance himself from the agenda in recent months following criticism of its proposals. Despite claiming in early July to “know nothing about Project 2025”, Trump has said that “some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

The Heritage Foundation received over £4.9 million between 1997 and 2017 from groups linked to Koch Industries. As revealed by DeSmog, advisory groups working on Project 2025 have received at least $9.6 million from Charles Koch since 2020, along with at least $21.5 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which is funded by the Mellon oil and banking fortune.

The Heritage Foundation has disputed these figures, though has not offered its own calculations. A spokesperson previously told DeSmog: “Heritage research is independent and accurate, these numbers are not.”

Orbán’s Fan Club

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has openly expressed his desire for hard-right, nationalist policies to be exported across the Western world. 

“This war is a culture war,” he told the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas. “We have to revitalise our churches, our families, our universities and our community institutions.”

The Danube-Heritage event featured four members of Orbán’s administration, including ministers, advisors, and ambassadors. 

This included Balázs Orbán, who has been a key advisor to the Hungarian prime minister since 2018. 

During his address, Orbán claimed that the “liberal world order has come to an end” and that a “new world order is coming” which values conservative ideas on immigration, culture, and global affairs. He pitched his vision of a “sovereign world order”, which he said should replace the liberal world order, and endorsed Trump for president. 

Orbán said that Trump and his running mate JD Vance “are made of the right stuff to face the challenges of this new sovereign world order… They seek peace not war, they implement economic policies based on national interests not ideologies, and they know what God and country truly means. Or, as we Hungarians say: God, nation, and family.”

Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump already have a close alliance, with the Republican candidate recently calling Orbán “one of the most respected men” and the “smart prime minister of Hungary”.

The Danube Institute, which co-hosted September’s event with the Heritage Foundation, is “one of the main tools of the Orbán government’s ideological expansion abroad,” according to Hungarian journalists at Atlatszo. 

John O’Sullivan, Danube’s president, has argued that climate change is not occurring at the rate held by the world’s leading scientists, and has enthusiastically cited the work of the GWPF. 

A number of the speakers at the event praised Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – which has been accused by the Center for American Progress of being “a textbook case of democratic backsliding” – even while they made arguments for greater freedom and democracy. 

Lord Frost lamented that “democratic discussion” is being undermined by progressive, liberal forces and claimed that there is a “semi-permanent governing class” in the EU that cannot be removed from power.

Yet, as Freedom House states in its annual monitoring report: since taking power in 2010, Orbán has “pushed through constitutional and legal changes that have allowed it to consolidate control over the country’s independent institutions. 

“The Fidesz government has passed anti-immigrant and anti-LGBT+ policies, as well as laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations that are critical of the ruling party or whose perspectives Fidesz otherwise finds unfavorable.”

Later in the conference, during a discussion about the prospect of China invading Taiwan, Tony Abbott said: “Freedom is global and it either advances globally or it retreats globally and if the friends of freedom are blasé about a dreadful assault on freedom anywhere, well then I think freedom everywhere is diminished.”

However, Abbott then praised the increasingly authoritarian Orbán for resisting “all the woke edicts from Brussels”. 

“Hungary has not succumbed to identity politics… and is doing its best to preserve its sense of self, its national identity, its national character. It is encouraging its people to be proud of its past and therefore more confident about the future. So I think on the internal challenges that are sapping the West, Hungary has been outstanding and Viktor Orbán has done a great job in all of that,” Abbott said. 

It is unclear how Abbott reconciles his belief in freedom with his support for Orbán’s administration. Later during the same panel, with Abbott in attendance, Hungary’s State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security Péter Sztáray boasted that his country had entirely banned pro-Palestine marches. 

“Given David Frost and Tony Abbott’s declarations about the importance of freedom, surely they are concerned that Orbán’s Fidesz party has taken de facto control of 80 percent of the country’s media and has systematically undermined the rule of law?,” said Peter Geoghegan of Democracy for Sale. 

Neither responded to DeSmog’s requests for comment.