In recent days, most of the traditional media has been obsessed with Keir Starmer’s plans and rhetoric on immigration. But across much of social media, a different UK story is dominating: that Keir Starmer is spending fortunes to dim the sun.
“The UK government is planning to block out the sun,” said one TikToker, in a post with hundreds of comments and thousands of likes. “This isn’t a joke”. Even a spoof local Facebook group for Wakefield joked: “Keir Starmer says he will move further and faster to block the sun after 1 in 10 Brits suffered sunburn over the weekend leaving them reaching for the aftersun.”
Commenters across the internet are incensed. “They been doing for years I’m sick of it!” said one. “Government cannot even fix potholes but worried about the sun,” said another. A third took a sceptical, if woefully misinformed, stance: “Block a sun that’s millions of miles away the earths (sic) defo flat”.
The issue is trickling through into the mainstream. GB News last month ran an online story headlined: “Britain to approve £50m sun-dimming experiments in bid to prevent runaway climate change”, while the Telegraph last week ran “The secretive government unit planning to dim the sun”.
It has even made it into parliament. During a recent energy questions, Reform MP Lee Anderson asked Ed Miliband “The secretary of state thinks it’s a good idea to fill our fields with solar panels at a cost of billions of pounds to the British taxpayer… so why is he supporting now a project to block out the sunshine?”
A nonplussed Miliband, visibly baffled, offered up an answer on investment in solar panels, but had no response to the apparently ridiculous suggestion that the government was trying to block out the sun.
The story is one that plays into the hands of conspiracy theorists everywhere; not least people convinced that special planes are spraying chemicals – visible in the form of “chemtrails” – to either subdue and control the population, or else to alter the climate (the trails, actually “contrails”, are in reality mostly water vapour and are caused by the normal operation of planes’ engines).
The temptation is to sternly dismiss the stories as misinformation, worry about their effect on politics, and move on – but the situation in reality is more complex than that. For one thing, the story that the government is funding research to dim the sun is almost entirely true.
One of Dominic Cummings’s few lasting legacies from his time in government was the establishment of ARIA, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency – a quango modelled after the USA defence agency DARPA to fund cutting-edge research.
Among its research priorities is investigating climate mitigation: technologies that could reduce global warming, potentially giving the world more time to wean itself off carbon. ARIA is unusually transparent by government standards, and has clear public documents explaining what it will fund in this area and why, plus how it will make decisions – and small-scale experiments on clouds are among those that make the cut.
These include experiments to see if clouds at sea could be made more reflective, slowing the warming of the oceans, which act as long-term heat reservoirs. This would involve doing precisely what chemtrail conspiracy theorists have long claimed is already happening – using planes to spray chemicals to modify the climate.
The actual plans are far more prosaic than the TikTok or Facebook posts suggest. Unsurprisingly, Starmer is not personally involved. The spending is around £50m – a lot of money to most of us, but only around one 250th of 1% of the government’s total spending.
The actual research being proposed is little more than a proof of concept – essentially a test of the theory to help compare the proposed solution to alternatives. How difficult is it to make clouds at sea more reflective? How much extra light do they reflect? Are there any unexpected consequences to doing so?
A few tens of millions might help provide early answers to those questions. It will absolutely not dim the sun in any way that matters to anything.
ARIA says the same thing, albeit more formally, in its public explanation of its research decision. “We see a need for a programme that will accommodate small, controlled, geographically confined outdoor experiments on approaches that may one day scale to help reduce global temperatures,” it states. “These outdoor experiments are intended to answer critical scientific questions as to the practicality, measurability, controllability and likely (side-)effects of the proposed approaches that cannot be answered by other means.”
ARIA even talks about the need for “public engagement” before such research is approved for funding, but appears somehow to have been caught off guard by the sustained interest from the public in a project that risks sounding like the secret plan of a Bond villain. Outside of its earnest, flowchart-laden, “programme thesis” document, it has nothing on its site addressing recent concerns.
This does suggest that no one within ARIA stopped to think what might happen if the agency funded a project exploring changing the climate by having planes spray something into clouds – despite there being a long-standing conspiracy movement that believes the government is already doing exactly that.
It further suggests that the government itself isn’t thinking about such things. At a time when Labour needs to persuade the public to radically change how we live over the next few decades – to avoid or at least mitigate catastrophic climate change – this is disheartening.
It is all too tempting to piously complain about “misinformation” or “disinformation” in these kinds of contexts, but the terms would be misapplied in this case: the way the story is being told might be overblown, but the core facts are true – the government is indeed exploring this as one of many climate projects.
The era when ministers and the lobby media could decide which issues would dominate the news on any given week ended long ago. Millions of people now get their news from social media, not newspapers or TV, and this is on their agenda.
If No 10 can’t learn how to spot stories like these as they emerge, and to speak to the people who are only reached by influencers about them, then government as we know it is, essentially, cooked. There is nothing malign about Labour’s actual plans here – but the fact that they don’t even seem to know they need to communicate that is itself deeply alarming.
The government is stuck playing a shell game, focusing on what newspapers and the BBC say, and failing to notice that the whole system lost most of its influence years ago. Dimming the sun might not be a particularly important story in itself, but what it says about the loss of media control does matter.
Westminster is toying with trials to darken the sky, but has failed to notice that the sun that’s actually dimming is the one on the news stands.
