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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