A Closer Look at ARIA: Britain’s Secretive £800 Million Sun-Dimming Quango
The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), established in 2023 with an £800 million purse of taxpayer funds, received a burst of publicity last week when it was unveiled that the agency was planning to “dim the sun” to fight global warming. The agency approved £56.8 million to be spent on “climate cooling” projects which include looking into the logistics of building a ‘sunshade’ in space and injecting plumes of salt water into the sky to reflect sunlight away from Earth.
ARIA is the brainchild of Dominic Cummings, a prominent British political strategist who served as the chief adviser to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2020. Cummings pitched a lean, “audacious” agency to fund high-stakes research in AI, quantum computing and synthetic biology, sidestepping the “timid bureaucracy” of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). In a research paper published in 2018 on his website, ‘On the ARPA/PARC “Dream Machine”, science funding, high performance and UK national strategy’, Cummings proposed a high-powered publicly-funded British research agency to emulate the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC).
The latter two entities inculcated high-risk, high-reward research with minimal bureaucracy and exemplified high-performance team performance, flexible work processes and visionary leadership. They yielded many innovations such as GPS, the internet, laser printing, the graphical user interface and the computer mouse, which resulted in large societal and economic returns.
On Governments Picking Winners
ARIA describes itself as an agency that “empowers scientists and engineers, from our Programme Directors to the teams we fund, with the resources and freedom to pursue breakthroughs at the edge of the possible… Created by an Act of Parliament, and sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, ARIA funds breakthrough R&D in underexplored areas to catalyse new paths to prosperity for the UK and the world”.
But ARIA is a shaky bet for Britain’s national welfare. The historical record of governments picking winners is a poor one. DARPA’s poster children — the internet and GPS — owe their global dominance to private enterprise. ARPANET, DARPA’s brainchild, needed decades of corporate muscle to become the internet we know. GPS flourished through market-driven scaling up, not Pentagon edicts.
DARPA’s $3.4 billion budget, propped up by the Department of Defence’s $190 billion procurement juggernaut, dwarfs ARIA’s £800 million. ARIA also lacks a clear ‘customer’ to turn ideas into reality. While DARPA is funded by and dedicated to the focused needs of the US Department of Defence, the Xerox PARC research lab was a private sector undertaking, serving the pecuniary needs of the company’s shareholders. ARIA, in contrast, is devoted to the broader, more amorphous goals of economic growth and prosperity.
Margaret Thatcher — Great Britain’s most audacious post-War Prime Minister — was a Hayekian, convinced that the fundamental role of government is to support private entrepreneurs, to unleash their ‘animal spirits’ in their areas of business expertise. She would have scoffed at proposals to ‘invest’ tax-payers’ money in quangos – quasi autonomous non-governmental organisations funded by the government – such as ARIA.
She would have found it more appropriate for the government to offer tax credits to the private sector to pursue its own lines of innovation and invention. For Thatcher, who did much to make “private enterprise not a dirty word anymore”, as the Economist put it, entrepreneurs with their own skin in the game – not government-appointed mandarins – are more likely to rescue Britain from its economic decline.
The Quango That Would Dim the Sun
ARIA, as a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation under the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, is a textbook case of government overreach. Unlike private firms, which innovate or die by market forces, quangos thrive on political cosiness and self-preservation. ARIA’s exemption from Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, baked into the 2022 ARIA Act, cloaks its £800 million budget in opacity. With little public scrutiny, ARIA could fritter away millions on pet projects, eroding trust in a nation still smarting from procurement scandals during the Covid lockdowns.
Cummings’s 2018 vision for ARIA as a bureaucracy-busting force is noble but naïve. Quangos, by their nature, morph into self-serving beasts, as Friedrich Hayek warned in The Fatal Conceit. His “curious task” of economics — showing how little planners know about what they design — applies to ARIA’s grandiose aims. The agency’s dabbling in geoengineering, like cloud brightening to cool the planet, smacks of hubris. The Telegraph’s Sarah Knapton calls ARIA a “shady no-man’s land” with “eye-watering” public funds but scant accountability, a sentiment echoing Hayek’s scepticism about state overreach.
Just how dimming the sun will help Britain’s quest for prosperity – ARIA’s explicit mandate – is not clear. Is the argument that temperate Britain is ‘over-heating’ and hence unable to promote economic growth? This goes against the historical record which shows that the Northern Atlantic underwent an agricultural revolution, more extensive human settlements and higher life expectancy rates during the Medieval Warming Period (900-1300) when temperatures were at least as high if not higher than in the late 20th Century.
Medical commentator Dr John Campbell raises urgent concerns about the planned sun dimming experiments, warning it could sabotage agricultural yields, trigger famine on a “biblical scale” and destabilise weather systems — all without public consent. James Melville, a media commentator with over half a million followers on X, questions “an energy strategy of plastering solar panels on farmland when the government also spends £50 million on dimming the sun experiments”.
Thaddeus G. McCotter, who served as a Republican representative in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003-2012, had this to say of ARIA’s proposed experiments:
Standing with both hands extended for a £50 million squeeze of the public teat, United Kingdom scientists claim the sun you celebrate in song contributes to ‘runaway climate change’. And these white-robed high priests of perfidious Albion’s climate cult have a novel idea to control the weather and forestall the impending apocalypse: dimming the sun.
In these experiments, ARIA is indistinguishable from the Green Blob that is doing the bidding of climate zealot Ed Miliband, from “sucking CO2 directly out of the ocean” to betting £22 billion in funding for unproven carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects.
Markets, Not Mandarins, for Britain’s Future
Private enterprise, not quangos, is Britain’s best bet for innovation and inventions that lift social welfare. The British agricultural and industrial revolutions took place in the 18th and 19th Centuries in the complete absence of government funding for science, as the work of Terence Kealey demonstrates. ARIA’s top-down bets driven by quango functionaries who buy into Ed Miliband’s obsessions with global climate change risk missing the mark on Britain’s urgent challenges to revive economic growth.
Government funding often crowds out private investment, skewing priorities. The £800 million sunk into ARIA could instead be used to slash taxes for start-ups or streamline regulations for tech hubs, unleashing market dynamism. Silicon Valley’s success stems from such freedom, not state handouts. ARIA’s mandarins, shielded from scrutiny, could cling to failing projects, wasting funds that markets would redirect swiftly. In sum, ARIA is a misguided use of taxpayers’ money. Private enterprise, with its ruthless efficiency and market-driven focus, trumps quangos in delivering innovations that can boost Britain’s economy and welfare. Britain deserves better — a market-led renaissance, not a quango’s pipe dreams.
King Canute apocryphally commanded the incoming waves to halt and not wet his feet or cloak. As the waves inevitably drenched him, he said: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but he whom heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws.” The humility and wisdom of Canute and his respect for eternal laws are evidently lost on the likes of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and its hubristic managers.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
Stop Press: ARIA CEO Ilan Gur has written in defence of his quango on Substack. Read it here.
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I’m sorry, I can’t comment. It says above that profanity & abuse is not allowed.
shady or what……
Shady Politicians Dim the Sun
These people are mad, literally mad.
Yes, but you have to admit there is method in their madness, taking £800M of our money. It’s pure corruption in my view.
And therein lies its raison d’etre.
The actual “project” is so stupid and futile I would be hard-pressed to think of a less prudent use of public money.
Carbon capture comes close though
Another 800 million quid sluiced into the trough to appease the greedy green gods.
Perhaps they could start with potholes and work their way up from there?
The examples of the internet and GPS together, while it’s a reasonable perspective, those two are a bit out of scale. GPS itself has several competitors, such as European, Chinese, Indian, and Russian alternatives.
Looking on the bright side, keeping someone like that occupied on something that won’t work could be a good investment, if it keeps him a cage, as it were.
Internet – Arpanet – and GPS are military projects. Anything military is a cost that yields no return therefore a loss.
And as far as the Internet is concerned, it produced no wealth. The wealth comes from the World Wide Web made possible by code written by Sir Tim Berners-Lee without Government funding and who gave it free to Humanity.
Military projects, of course, yield returns.
Trade has always followed from overseas defence treaties.
The excellence of the British Armed Forces has generated huge sums for British Defence Companies who pay billions in corporation tax.
The Royal Yacht, upon which contracts for British Companies beyond number were signed, was paid for out of the defence budget.
Liquid crystal display IPR, developed by Defence R&D, has generated considerable revenue.
The original VW Beetle factory was reconstituted by the British Army immediately after WW2.
Defence, very much like the Royal Family, pays for itself many times over.
Our allies appreciate our security guarantees and reciprocate, indirectly, with trade.
Such a silly comment.
Sir Frank Whittle, having directed British defence development of the jet engine as a government employee, retired as an Air Commodore and went home for tea and a knighthood!
Dominic “Warp Speed” Cummings.
Should have deform speed!
I think it would have been useful to repeat the information on income levels of ARIA staff as highlighted in the first Daily Sceptic article on this quango.
“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.”
It’s this sort of information that wakes up those who would normally choose not to take any interest in science.
The first names of these Aria people tells me all i need to know about them. It seems like money well spent if it ensures they keep out of harms way for a few years. If i change my name to Rupert, can i get a job there too? I promise i wont do any harm – or anything, actually.
Millions of pounds for eco-terrorism
Dominic Cummings had a good idea about ARIA, one which I applauded at the time. He has nothing to do with the project that spends our money on futile projects like this.
My guess is that it has been captured by the same woke ideology that pervades the public sector and that some politician is manipulating what the money is going to do to support some pet obsession of theirs
If the state is going to spend our money on stuff, it should be as efficient as possible. But I would dispute that this is something the state should be doing at all. The fact that state bodies are so easily captured by ideologues is exactly why it should not be involved in much that is at all discretionary.
State and efficiency = oxymoron.
The Industrial Revolution, all the science, technology, innovation of the 18th and 19th Century which made it possible, got no Government taxpayer money, didn’t have “Agencies” instead private individuals and private enterprise.
Post-war, railways everywhere became State-owned, job providers, social services, taxpayer funded, shielded by regulation, subsidy and taxation, ensuring no innovation and development of surface transportation so we are stuck with 200 year old technology that has long outlived its usefulness and only survives propped up by taxpayer plunder – whether allegedly privatised or not.
Just as England starts producing consistently excellent sparkling wines, this lunatic uses our money to try and turn the sun off!
They do a nice white round my way too – “leggermente mosso” as the Italians call it: Hudshill Bacchus 2023 | Hazel End Vineyard | Still and Sparkling Wines
Has solar panel enthusiast Ed Milivolt been consulted by the sun-dimming dreamers of Aria? Might their plans prove to be incompatible?
Miliband’s real goal isn’t to produce energy for the masses, solar or otherwise. His goal is to impoverish the masses by any way possible.
Dim Politicians Dim the Sun
I know one shouldn’t, bearing in mind the seriousness of the waste of money, but is this dim sun project really a Chinese conspiracy 🤔 😅
Its Dim Sum. Which describes Millibands cost benefit case for netzero perfectly.
“US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC).
The latter two entities inculcated high-risk, high-reward research with minimal bureaucracy and exemplified high-performance team performance, flexible work processes and visionary leadership. They yielded many innovations such as GPS, the internet, laser printing, the graphical user interface and the computer mouse, which resulted in large societal and economic returns.”
No they didn’t. They are just buraucrqcies do.ing out cash. All those innovations were the work of private enterprise who, of course, worked for whoever had the cash.
The reason why so much art and music from classical composers is religious artworks and religious music is because the Church was were the cash was.
To say Government agencies “yielded” many innovations, is like saying the Pope and the Budhops “yielded” so many pieces of great artwork and music.
“… high-risk, high-reward research…”
No, just high risk. Such high risk that private investors wouldn’t risk their capital so the taxpayer who has no choice got mugged instead.
Where there was “high reward” that went to the private sector who got the taxpayer cash doled out to them.
I think it was actually a bill for £56.8 million for dim sum, that was one hell of an evening. ARIA reminds me a little of the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments in ‘That Hideous Strength’.
Apart from continuing to be reminded of Chinese restaurants the Dim Sun idea is not entirely fanciful, except that its execution would be wildly expensive and difficult to confine to one country. Manmade manipulation of nature has its serious risks, as witnessed by the Aral Sea catastrophe. But dimming the sun does indeed cause global cooling. Think Krakatoa. The trouble with that is, of course, that such seismic volcanic events result in a depression of agriculture. I vote we wait until the current sunspot activity dies down, the Earth’s magnetic field has altered and the meteorological nonsense of ghost recording has disappeared. That means we will wait forever. Hooray!
Pinky and the brain…one is a genius, the other’s insane….what could possibly go wrong? Why oh why would you do that? Why would anybody do that??
This madness is already happening. Here and in the US where steps are being taken to have it banned.
The key issue is whether it is safe to play with our atmosphere and how unpleasant are the chemicals and materials used to attempt such a stupidity?
I’m applying for a multi million pound grant to research trans-women penis shaped dildos for lesbians.
No mention of bill gates. Why? So the same guy that made a pigs breakfast out of the plandemic in the Uk, will take the reins of dimming the Sun project. What could possibly go wrong. By the way, the Uk has been very busy chem trailing for a few yrs now. Why did the incompetent gov’t suddenly decide to tell Brits they were going to waste even more taxpayer money to dim the Sun. Florida and Tennessee just banned Geoengineering (chem trails) over their states. Won’t be long before the trump admin will ban this destructive distribution of poisonous chemicals. We are waiting. Please watch Dane Witington’s Geoengineering Watch.net. Read and listen to Dr. Willie Soon’s, an astrophysicist. Listen to his science and views on “climate change”. When nothing else makes sense, you must dig deeper. Take the time to dig deeper for you children’s future.
We have been told for years that man-made emissions are the root cause of global warming, which apparently is very bad for us, despite 9 x more people die of cold than heat.
But now it looks like the solution to the problem of man-made emissions could be to blot out the sun. So how about they try blotting out the sun over China and India first. Lets see how that goes.
1) Cover food production areas with solar panels.
2) Spend £m on cloud creation experiment to ensure that (1 above fails totally)
All in the name of removing the life sustaining gas, which isn’t causing a climate catastrophe.
Oxymoronic doesn’t seem to be a strong enough description for this total scientific and economic lunacy.