Sun-Dimming Quango has £800 Million of Taxpayer Money to Blow – and a CEO on £450k – Watts Up With That?

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

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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