The latest from the climate alarmism’s anti-capitalism department: Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (parent of the 2015 Paris climate agreement) and now a leader in “Mission 2020,” an international cooperative effort to get global carbon dioxide emissions on a downward trend by 2020, is upset with heavy industry—especially (not surprisingly!) in the United States.

She told Thomson Reuters Foundation News that heavy industry isn’t cooperating with attempts to curb global warming.

What’s wrong?

It’s not replacing high-intensity, instant-on-demand, always-there-when-you-need-it energy from fossil fuels with low-intensity, intermittent, often-not-there-when-you-need-it energy from solar and wind.

“We’re definitely not on track with everything to do with heavy industry that continues to depend on intense, high-carbon electricity,” she said.

Her complaint generated this tongue-in-cheek response from Eric Worrall on WattsUpwithThat.com:

You would think that if they put their minds to it, owners of say metal foundries would have found ways to process ore and melt metal which didn’t involve prodigious amounts of reliable energy, a solution more in tune with nature than all those dirty smelly factories, perhaps a smelting technique which involves concentrated positive thinking and a few wind turbines.

Clearly heavy industry bosses are just too lazy to think outside the box, to find the environmentally sensitive solutions our planet so desperately needs.

This is the same Christiana Figueres who at a news conference in Brussels in early 2015 let the cat out of the bag so far as her own agenda in pursuit of what became the Paris agreement is concerned, saying,

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. … This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.

As Investors Business Daily editorialized at the time,

The only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled.

Figueres is perhaps the perfect person for the job of transforming “the economic development model” because she’s really never seen it work. “If you look at Ms. Figueres’ Wikipedia page,” notes Cato economist Dan Mitchell: Making the world look at their right hand while they choke developed economies with their left.”

Figueres’s anti-capitalism has deep roots. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, President of Costa Rica from 1953–1958 (and Provisional President 1948–1949) was a self-described “farmer-socialist” running under the banner of the National Liberation Party who led what he called “a deeper and more human revolution than that of Cuba” while nationalizing the banking industry. Her brother, Jose Maria Figueres, was President from 1994–1998. She earned her masters in social anthropology from the Left-dominated London School of Economics. Perhaps not surprisingly, the family is heavily invested in the renewable energy industry they hope will replace fossil fuels.

Combine an anti-capitalist ideological commitment to socialism with the pursuit of their own profit through mandated renewable energy, and Figueres’s complaint against heavy industry needs no further explanation.