America Should Lead the Fight Against Global Energy Poverty

Global events during the past several years make three things crystal clear: Energy security is national security, abundant energy is an irreplaceable tool for adapting to climate volatility and improving living standards, and U.S. diplomacy abroad is only as credible as the concrete options and solutions the country brings to the table. In some cases, these are fully private solutions, such as the liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports that helped Europe weather the cutoff of Russian gas supplies resulting from Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In others, they are government-facilitated efforts, such as the power grid resilience efforts that the U.S. Agency for International Development led in the Philippines, Thailand, Ukraine, and other countries.

If Washington cannot deliver, China will and while doing so diminish U.S. position and power. Consider, for instance, the roughly 50 gigawatts of power projects that Chinese state-owned firms have built or are building for electricity systems in Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam—all of which are (or can be) key U.S. regional partners.

Washington should openly embrace and lead the fight against global energy poverty. The same way the Green Revolution enhanced U.S. power and position by improving food security across the global south two generations ago, so too can an energy abundance revolution bolster the U.S. strategic position in this generation’s great-power competition.

The United States’ tremendous resource base, technological capabilities, and industrial prowess position it to first ensure that U.S. citizens do not face “heat versus eat” decisions and then to build a better world for the billions of people who still live in energy poverty. Full pursuit of these two vital priorities will cement Americans’ own prosperity and strategic position.

When the United States pursues energy abundance itself and postures other countries to do the same, it fortifies the world against tyrants, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who would use energy as a weapon. Imagine how dark—figuratively and literally—the world would be if U.S. exporters had not been able to swing their LNG exports to Europe in a matter of days and weeks once Russia began curtailing gas supplies before and after its second invasion of Ukraine? Just as the Berlin Airlift helped the free world stand strong in 1948, so too did the U.S.-led effort in 2022 help keep Kyiv free.

Energy abundance also enriches, and saves, individual lives. It means more children drinking safe water in Nigeria and Sudan, fewer women breathing harmful wood smoke in rural India, and more parents elevating their families with better paying jobs in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Former Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo likely spoke for billions of people in the developing world when he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2021 that “our citizens cannot be forced to wait for battery prices to fall or new technologies to be created in order to have reliable energy and live modern, dignified lives.” Helping them to fulfill aspirations of access to modern energy sources would, as I have showed in previous work, make billions of lives better while winning hearts and minds in the process.

Washington is uniquely positioned to lead energy poverty alleviation efforts, since the United States has the greatest comprehensive global competitive capacity in energy production. To be sure, this is not the case in every potential energy value chain. Wind and solar are already dominated by China, whose industrial policy has yielded massive overcapacity relative to demand. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds to chase those manufacturing sectors would be poor fiscal stewardship.

The United States should instead take advantage of cheap and low-security-risk Chinese basic hardware, such as solar panels, and for other, more security-sensitive items, such as control systems and the inverters that change direct current electricity into alternating current, require a separate edition that is manufactured in the United States, Canada, or Mexico and which runs audited, open-source software with verified datalink and internet connection hardware.

In other critical areas that comprise much larger sectors of global energy supply now, such as oil and natural gas, the United States is extremely competitive. In 2023, it accounted for about 16 percent of global crude oil production and approximately 25 percent of natural gas production. The shale boom that lifted U.S. production to these levels offers a critical, and apropos, historical lens because what started as a fundamentally domestic enterprise in the mid-2000s ended up achieving transformative energy security impacts far beyond U.S. borders. Europe’s ability to withstand Russian gas coercion during the first phases of the Ukraine war by surging imports of U.S.-produced LNG testifies to this reality.

Parts of Africa and Ukraine each have major gas development potential that could be accelerated with injections of U.S. firms’ capital and expertise and yield mutually beneficial partnerships. One way to begin facilitating such interactions literally requires the stroke of a pen: changing the Treasury Department’s “Guidance on Fossil Fuel Energy at the Multilateral Development Banks” so that instead of stifling natural gas development in the global south by discouraging foreign investment, it encourages it.

Doing so would open the landscape for public capital providers such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to help de-risk the gas-fired power plants and pipeline projects needed to get gas molecules to market in energy-hungry countries with indigenous gas resources. These demand signals and infrastructure would in turn catalyze drilling and production of gas. These steps can catalyze a virtuous cycle in which developing countries accelerate their own economic growth and reduce energy poverty.

U.S. producers, manufacturers, and financiers are also well positioned to shape the development and deployment of new, low-emission, resilient, and secure baseload energy resources from geothermal and next-generation nuclear. Both sectors leverage unparalleled domestic U.S. expertise in subsurface geology, advanced manufacturing, and the marriage of technical expertise and financial prowess that is needed to achieve terawatt-sized scale-up.

Depending on the reactor size, each gigawatt of need is likely to require somewhere between three and 70 small modular reactors, or SMRs, each of which is likely to cost $70 million or more. With a global addressable market that is easily in the hundreds of gigawatts—including in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—the opportunity is enormous. China and Russia already operate SMRs and are also vying to be the energy supplier of choice for many of these areas, a reality that must invigorate U.S. competitive spirit. To boot, meeting the emerging nuclear opportunity is not just an U.S. venture but an allied one—Australian and Canadian uranium and Japanese and South Korean construction, steel, and forging capabilities will also be critical. Advanced geothermal can also strongly compete in many of the same markets as nuclear, particularly in East Africa and the Indo-Pacific.

To unlock nuclear and geothermal opportunities, the Trump administration should take three key steps. First, the Defense Department should consider becoming an anchor customer for SMRs and advanced geothermal—starting in Alaska. An open competition should be used to select the most appropriate technology at the lowest cost and highest safety and scalability, with the incentive of being able to serve one of the world’s largest energy-consuming entities.

Second, the administration should consider seeking supplemental funding for the International Development Finance Corp. (DFC). DFC was established in 2019 and is the U.S. government’s development finance institution. It partners with private capital to invest throughout the developing world and strategic locations in sectors including energy, health care, critical infrastructure, and technology. DFC backing can potentially help facilitate exports of U.S. firms’ advanced nuclear reactors and geothermal systems. To ensure congruence with core U.S. national interests, DFC should be encouraged to prioritize project financing for areas with the highest combination of strategic competition and energy poverty.

Third, the administration should launch an Indo-Pacific energy geoeconomics initiative. Electricity and fuels are a critical competitive domain, and the United States should leverage its competitive advantages across the clean and reliable energy sources and technologies it excels at: LNG now and, with the right approach, advanced geothermal and modular nuclear in the near future.

Writing 67 years ago, U.S. Sen. Hubert Humphrey noted that “[o]ur reserves of food and fiber, and our ability to produce such commodities in abundance, are resources to be prized; to be used boldly and imaginatively, and not be dribbled away.” Substituting “energy” for “food and fiber” makes the statement as relevant in 2025 as it was in 1958.

Energy offers opportunities for the United States to do well for itself, improve lives in allied and partner countries, and short-circuit its adversaries’ attempts to corrode and damage a global architecture that has delivered unprecedented prosperity and well-being over the past 80 years. An energy abundance agenda can help underwrite human betterment, peace, and security. The United States can pursue it in a fully bipartisan fashion. And most importantly, the work starts now, at home.