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.
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.
It means essentially Aria is operating like a private company, but doing so on public finances. And it is wading into areas where the private sector would normally dominate.
Playing poker with public money
In January, it announced it would be giving £69 million to research on neural robots for epilepsy treatment, genetic engineering of brain cells and lab-grown brain organoids.
It is also funding an NHS trial to use a brain computer interface that alters brain activity using ultrasound, in the hopes it will treat depression and addiction, as well as investing in synthetic plants and chromosomes.
Such sci-fi future-gazing is usually left to billionaire tech bros or big pharma, precisely because the cost is prohibitive and private companies have the resources to soak up the risk.
But the Government has given Aria free rein to embark on scientific research that “carries a high risk of failure” – something that the public sector usually shies away from.
The “high risk, high reward” strategy is reminiscent of Elon Musk’s “fail fast” approach that has undoubtedly brought success at Space X and Tesla.
But while Mr Musk had clear objectives, and put $100 million of his own money on the line, Aria’s approach feels far more scattergun, as if it doesn’t quite know what it is trying to achieve.
It is operating like a speculative venture capital fund, essentially playing poker with the public purse.
If Britain were booming, maybe this could be justified, but public sector debt is rising and now, more than ever, taxpayers are demanding their money be used wisely.
Certainly its latest foray into geoengineering has been met with public incredulity.
When sun-dimming experiments were first mooted last month, one Telegraph reader liked it to “what Hanna-Barbera might have dreamed up to foil Dick Dastardly in Wacky Races”.
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