by Tilak Doshi
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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Well, they do need to be stopped..
ARIA is the brainchild of Dominic Cummins. That brilliant government advisor who took his family on a road trip to a castle “to have his eye sight tested” while the whole of the UK was under a crushing lock-down because there was a deadly uncurable virus going round and then lied about it.
Yup, exactly the guy you think of when you hear “we need to dim the sun”.
The fact that the NHS, especially their psychiaric section, is in crisis has been proved once again courtesy of Dominic Cummins.
Huls, I don’t want my sun dimmed.
The people suggesting this action can carry parasols and wear sunglasses if they have a morbid fear of sunlight. They sound dim enough already.
ARIA wants to dim the sun ?
Lock them up and turn off the lights.
They like the dark ….
Won’t have to turn off the lights. No sun. No electricity from those massive solar voltaic obscenities.
Cummings is well-versed in the black arts of persuasion.
To be fair, if I’d just been in bed for a week with the flu, and was planning a 250 mile, 5+ hour trip tomorrow, I’d probably want to do a shorter trip just to make sure I was up to it.
I read the article by Llan Gur. To me it echos many such justifications for similar organisations and leadership positions. All good stuff, but then within you see duplication with other quangos. The phrase in all these writings, and when stated verbally, that always jars is the ubiquitous “ to become world class……..world leaders .”
Well, I suppose grand ambition overtly espoused gives one a sense of importance and worth.
Tilak Doshi,
Very well argued. I have nothing much to add except appreciation.
I worked through the 1970-80 years when industry funded much of the research and the bureaucracy was much smaller and poorer. I call them the “golden years”. All that stops a return is the level of ignorance in the bureaucracy, leading to hostility towards the private sector that made them wealthy. That is not gratitude, it is shameful. Geoff S
Cnut the Great wasn’t one for u-turns.
No need for ARIA, just allow shipping to keep using bunker fuel.
The SO2 emitted, at no cost, will help dim the sun and also have a side effect of providing sulphur that is needed to fertilise crops.
Use the £800 million for better projects.
Slowly the lights are extinguished in a United Kingdom heading for third world status.
Already there.
Yeah! You should see our roads!
Every drop of fresh water on the planet is made by the Sun shining on the Oceans (Not potable). They want to reduce the fresh water supply?
Nippy
They are trying to hit many birds with one stone.
Reducing crop yields via less sun and poisoning the land.
Lowering fertility.
Reduction in available food for cows(Reducing red meat production is essential part of their plan),
and eventually reducing the population numbers.
And all will be blamed on climate crisis.
And blocking the sun in England wherr the sun never shines is like destroying dams in a desert like California.
Deliberate sabotage to get rid of two-legged carbon.
I find it absurd that Brits fear warmer weather. The Daily Mirror calls anything over 20 C a “heat wave”.
The coldest winter those arab invaders ever experienced was the summer in England.
Trying to dim the sun is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. It’s right up there with atmospheric carbon capture. Both of them are Rube Goldberg projects. Except the atmospheric cooling on a large scale would be catastrophic. Humans have always done better in periods with warmer climates. If they actually succeed in cooling the planet and they overshoot–we will all want their heads.
So what happens to solar voltaic electricity generation when we dim the sun?
One of the coolest, cloudiest countries in the world wants to “dim the sun?” As a Brit might say, “Have you gone mad? Crackers? Bonkers?”
They’re in a panic over global warming in Canada, also, which is the coldest major country, and stands to benefit most if the climate warmed up.
If sub-Saharan Africa — the one region in the world where malnutrition is still common — started seeing crop yields decrease after sun-dimming experiments, you might hear complaints about cultural imperialism get really loud.
Not all of us Canadians are in a panic over global warming, in fact I don’t think the government is in a panic just that they’ve discovered a new way to get blood out of a stone. That lunatic Carney sucked up to the populace by reducing the carbon tax to zero( notice he didn’t get rid of it) claiming to reduce peoples costs and then kept the industrial tax which also comes out of our pockets. I expect the tax to suddenly increase when he “discovers” that the government doesn’t have enough money.
Personally I could do with a couple more degrees of warmth, it’s 13C at the moment and I’m trying to get my garden in.
The only actual climate dangers are global cooling and CO2 starvation. Should the next glaciation start to commence it will be crucial to use geo-engineering to stop it. Otherwise the cold oceans will suck enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to put us right back on the brink of CO2 starvation that almost ended all land-animal life on earth during the last glaciation.
CO2 levels got down in the range of 180 PPM for about 40,000 years. Take a look at a chart of plant grow versus CO2 levels and you’ll see that there’s barely any plant growth once CO2 levels get that low.
The total amount of plant growth/ photosynthesis caps the size of the food chain. Thus there must have been a dramatic decrease in the total size of the food chain over those 40,000 years. If the food chain had collapsed the only remaining higher life forms would’ve been in the oceans.
I’m guessing the food chain did some wobbling. That is the most likely explanation for the extinction of most of the planets megafauna. The size of the food chain limits the size of the largest animals it can support. If the size of the food chain shrank dramatically, that’s a likely explanation for why the largest species died off.
We can’t let the planet fall back into that perilous state. The little bit of CO2 we have put back into the atmosphere will be quickly sucked into the cooling oceans and will not make a significant dent in the danger of CO2 starvation.
Hopefully no action is needed until we’re able to provide nice clean technological solutions like a big reflectors in space to catch some of the sunlight that would otherwise pass by the Earth and direct it to melt excessive snow and ice.
In the meantime, before we are sure that global warming is needed yet, capacity could be developed by encouraging Elon to get really rich by using reflectors to let tropical countries sell some of their excess sunlight to higher latitude cities that would like to have more, for a modest transmission fee.
On the small chance that net cooling of the planet will ever be warranted, reflectors could also be used to direct sunlight away from the planet.
But that there are lunatics out there plotting to artificially cool the Earth now, when the only danger is global cooling, is alarming. If they were actually to do anything significant it should be regarded as an act of war against the planet.
I am pessimistic about any geo-engineering attempt to stop the next glaciation. Local mitigation will be possible, but globally it is a loosing game, just IMO. Of course, if humanity had access to unlimited amount of energy, in theory anything could be done, but this is just a a fantasy. Pumping more CO2 than nature removes has been demonstrated, therefore it is mostly limited by access to hydrocarbons. If by keeping CO2 higher humans succeed in preventing the next desertification, we might unintendedly prolong the next glaciation.
Someone,
We are told that the carbon isotope pattern, linked to CO2 in the atmosphere after some bomb tests, does NOT support disaster forecasts from “pumping more CO2 than nature produces ….”
Is the carbon isotope work wrong? How?
I agree that mankind is adding CO2 to the air, but it is a tiny fraction of Nature’s contribution and it ends up in the ocean in a few years. Why the worry about it spending a short time in the air on its way to the oceans?
Geoff S
I can’t comment on isotope argument. It could be true. But here are some arithmetic considerations.
In Vostok ice core data CO2 levels during last interglacials peak below 300 ppm. They are now above 400 ppm. Nature can be only net sink or net source. Humans are net source. The CO2 atmospheric levels grow at about 1/2 of human contributions. This adds up to Nature being net sink for 1/2 human contributions.
I do not worry about extra CO2 in the air, I think it is good. However, if global desertification is a required step for getting out of the bottom of glaciations to an interglacial, there potentially could be a problem in distant future. Conversely, if humans could spend enough resources dispersing soot and salt over snow and ice and snow, perhaps they could help Nature get out of glaciations more often than it normally does.
I did not say that humans pump more CO2 than Nature produces, and certainly did not say it was a problem, let alone a disaster. I think the accepted estimate is that humans contribute 5% on top of Nature 95%.
I think there is a dirty way to get the job done: just dot the great white north with coal burning plants designed to maximize soot production. They could produce their own power of course, and any other locally needed power, but the object would be to paint snow white, over and over again as necessary to keep snow and ice in check.
Where snow and ice are year round, that dirtification would not be easily undone. It never gets to the bottom and keeps melting the top.
Still much better than descending into glaciation, which could end us. But clean would be better.
A big enough market for sunlight in northern climes might do it. That could be a pretty big market.
Theoretically yes, but it is all a matter of cost. I also suspect that when glaciation starts, humans will abandon Arctic, and there will be little justification for many power plants there. It could make more sense to disperse salt and soot from planes over vast expanses of in NH.
Unfortunately, dirtification of the top layer can be easily undone by one snowfall.
More sunlight in northern regions would be welcome right now. But is there a credible project of at least 1 sq mile reflector in geostationary orbit capable of lighting 10 sq miles of a polar city? I think not.
Regarding reflectors in space… we have not even demonstrated ability to use sunlight to increase insolation of human settlements in polar regions. Redirecting enough sunlight to melt glaciers is many orders of magnitude more difficult task.
War against humanity.
Which is the cynical mission of the Climate Nazis.
And their followers and supporters are too foolish to see it.
The Climate Nazis are the Matrix’s “Agent Smiths” of our time. Villains, not heros.
Unintended consequences are obviously built in.
How do you contain your modifications to the atmosphere to just the air above your country.
If it crosses national boundaries, it can and possibly will be construed as an act of war.
I sincerely hope that someone is looking into the effects on the biosphere when these chemicals come raining down on us.
An act of war of humanity on itself.
As is this whole boondoggle that has been ongoing for decades.
Clearly government is the problem, whittle government down to size and the majority of our problems just disappear.
If humanity actually survives, we will look back at the absurdity of denying the planet its lifeblood – sunlight, based on an absurd Pagan belief that human carbon dioxide is the dominant driver of catastrophic global warming.
The very act of attempting to dim sunlight-the ultimate tragedy of the commons is basically an admission that the sun is a major cause of global warming. They are contradicting their own narrative.
There has been no consultation with the People, no evidence tendered to support the hypothesis that human carbon dioxide is causing catastrophic global warming (because there is actually zero such evidence) and no debate.
Just how absurd do things have to get before people rise up to throw their treasonous leaders out?
The US just managed it.
A lot tougher to do in “parliamentary” governments…
Any attempt to dim the sun would be an attack as potentially devastating as a nuclear one, and should be treated as such.
They want to block the Sun. I’m sure the Earth won’t mind.
Where are all the protesters that want to “Save the Planet!”?