Sun-Dimming Quango has £800 Million of Taxpayer Money to Blow – and a CEO on £450k
Recently, this site reported that £50 million worth of taxpayer money was about to be approved to blot out the Sun in the name of staving off ‘global warming’.
The Telegraph has more on developments and the eye-watering sums of money being quietly allocated to Aria to develop potentially irreversible interventions in the natural world, while also paying extravagant salaries:
Plans to block sunlight to fight global warming have inadvertently shone a light on Aria, the Government’s opaque research arm.
The Advanced Research and Invention Agency was set up in 2021 by Kwasi Kwarteng, the ex-Tory business secretary, and was originally the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief aide.
Yet few people on the street know what it is, what it does, or how much taxpayer cash is flowing into its well-financed coffers.
Sure, it has a shiny website stocked with techno-waffle promising to help scientists “reach for the edge of the possible” and foster “opportunity spaces” but there has been little clarity on its day-to-day operations.
This week, we learnt it will spend £56.8 million on 21 “climate cooling” projects, which include looking into the logistics of building a “sun shade” in space and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth.
“We’re not trying to dim the Sun,” representatives from Aria said rather disingenuously at a press briefing, knowing full well that should experiments prove successful, that is their ultimate aim.
It doesn’t take long to follow the gravy train. As tiresomely usual, it’s the same old story of pigs in the trough:
Prof Mike Hulme, of Cambridge University, pointed out that the experiments were setting Britain on a “slippery slope” towards mass deployment of technologies that will be impossible to prove are safe, effective and reversible until they are actually in the sky.
He warned: “[The sum of] £57 million is a huge amount of taxpayers’ money to be spent on this assortment of speculative technologies intended to manipulate the Earth’s climate.”
Aria has been given an eye-watering £800 million budget to play with, with little to show for it so far, except some off-the-wall ideas, and astronomically high wage bills.
Ilan Gur, the Chief Executive, is being paid around £450,000 annually – three times more than the Prime Minister, while Antonia Jenkinson, the Chief Finance Officer, takes home around £215,000 and Pippy James, the Chief Product Officer, around £175,000.
In fact, Aria is blowing £4.1 million a year on wages despite having just 37 staff, with the top four staff at the company pocketing nearly £1 million of taxpayers’ cash each year between them.
Likening Aria’s approach to a scattergun, the Telegraph’s judgement is that the quango “is operating like a speculative venture capital fund, essentially playing poker with the public purse”.
Worth reading in full if only to register just how much and how expensive the insanity is becoming. No wonder Reform did well last week.
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I wonder what trials have been done on the impact on human health, on nature, on crops?I suspect less than went into the Covid injection trials and look at the fall out from that.
Exactly who gave the order that this is ok? that the planet can be experimented on? who stands to gain? and who takes the responsibility and accountability for the terrible results it could have on the world?
Frankly I am sick of politicians and billionaires playing God, and especially so with my money.
I have similar concerns about the unintended impacts of such a strategy. Will plants be less able to photosynthesise? Will humans suffer from Vitamin D deficiencies? Will the process cause excessive rainfall in one area and drought in another? Will it interfere with electronic equipment in the way that wind farms do?
And if it makes the climate unstable, will the powers that be simply explain that it shows the “climate emergency” is developing faster than we thought, and we therefore need to do more of this stuff?
One thing is certain: whatever happens, our money would have been better spent elsewhere. By us as private citizens.
It would be more use burning £20 notes to keep warm in the winter.
If over the sea will the plankton photosynthesise less affecting the food chains?
I just noticed that the photo says we are looking at a Lammy? Is he in on this scam too?
Funny how all these seemingly conservative people – Kwarteng, Cummings – turn out to be just a slightly different breed of central planner.
And I know how they get there. They look at examples from around the world, like from China, where they see massive state run, seemingly cutting edge operations that look incredibly successful and see themselves as the wise men of our society who will enlighten the rest of us with their visionary (actually, carbon copy) ideas, they’re ripping off from elsewhere.
That’s the most charitable take. The less charitable one is that it’s another scam like all of these quangos.
I guess not many people go into politics in order to make politicians less important, less powerful, involved in less. Even Trump likes to “do stuff”. I don’t really follow what Milei is doing closely, but it seems he went into politics to do a huge pruning operation, but he’s an outlier.
President Javier Milei is one of Argentina’s National Treasures.
He also comes across very well- knowledgeable, coherent, fiery but never ranting. He would make mincemeat of most of the UK media.
Governments are elected by voters to look after them and their interests. They are not elected to conduct experiments on the national population and the planet as a whole (e.g. mRNA vaccines, lockdowns, solar geoengineering). Only President Trump seems to have embraced the former approach; the rest of the world’s leaders have chosen the latter.
Are they completely mad?
Probably not but the money’s good.
Somebody else’s money always is…
Following the money!
According to the original Telegraph article, this hair-brained scheme to sluice away public money “is exempt from freedom of information requests.”
How convenient that is.
How can that be?
Sun Dimming Net Zero Lunacy
Just the fact that this nonsense is “immune from FOI requests” is outrageous.
It’s a complete can of worms!!
I’m sure none of the salt sprayed into the clouds could possibly land on the earth and make it completely barren.
It could be good for the modelling effort if the data from these experiments is made available.
On a personal note I do like actual summers which may be why I used to live in the subtropics and thus I don’t want to see this stuff go into production.
Ohh dear god, not more models???
One public commenter on an Infowars article about all the vast underground bunkers the Globalists are reportedly building to protect them from WW3 Apocalypse/Global Warming or whatever, had this to say:
“Last quarter of 2046. That’s when. I hope the underground bunkers save you when there’s 3 miles of ice on top of it. The polar reversal creates a dust cloud that plunges the planet into the next ice age. One needs to be within five degrees of the equator in an east-facing cave. Enjoy!”
There is a good case for saying dust modulates ice ages. Once into a glaciation, high reflection from ice caps prevents melting most times the orbital mechanics swing into a warming phase. But as co2 falls during the cold times, being absorbed into oceans, it eventually reaches a level where the high latitude forests and grasslands die off, letting storms whip up the bare earth and dump it on the ice. Next time a warm comes along the dark ice heats up and melts pretty quick. Repeats four times, last half million years.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674987116300305
But all that renewable energy will surely keep us warm – the wind turbines and solar panels buried under the ice?!
Ilan Gur – is he (or she?) British? And Pippy James, the Chief Product Officer… what products do they actually produce?
Trump’s DOGE effort would see the end of this. I hope we get our own version with Reform, possibly watered down and that’s if Reform can keep it’s house in order.