Christiana Figueres, who leads the United Nations negotiations to cut greenhouse gas emissions, described the climate change she seeks as a world-encompassing “revolution” engineered by “centralized” governments.

“We are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken,” Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said in an interview published by The Guardian last week.

She compared the UN-led ‘revolution’ on greenhouse gases to the Industrial Revolution. “The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective,” she said. “This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.”

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The upcoming COP 18 talks in Doha, Qatar, have a variety of goals. Negotiators hope governments will “promote, and cooperate in, the development, application and diffusion of climate friendly technologies” both domestically — think Solyndra — and in other countries “because large-scale investments are required to significantly reduce emissions, notably in sectors that emit large quantities of greenhouse gases.”