Ending Energy Poverty

At a Glance

• More than 700 million people have no access to electricity. Billions more rely on wood, charcoal, and animal dung for cooking—fuels that kill, impoverish, and pollute.
• Energy poverty, as DOE Sec. Chris Wright has argued, is the world’s most urgent humanitarian crisis.
• Access to reliable, affordable energy is the single most powerful driver of economic development, human health, and national security.
• USLNG is the fastest, most scalable path to ending energy poverty in the developing world.

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The Refrigerator That Changed Everything

In 2013, Todd Moss, then a senior U.S. diplomat and later founder of the Energy for Growth Hub, bought a refrigerator. The yellow energy efficiency tag said it would use 459 kilowatt-hours per year. That morning, Moss had been working with electricity consumption data, and he suddenly realized something: his single American kitchen appliance would use more electricity than most people living in Africa consume in an entire year. He made a simple graphic illustrating the gap. It went viral. It launched a think tank. And it remains the most powerful illustration of the global energy divide ever made.

That gap is not a statistic. It is a daily, lived catastrophe for billions of people.

The Crisis the World Ignores

Energy poverty kills. Women and children breathing smoke from wood and charcoal fires suffer lung disease, eye damage, and premature death at rates that dwarf many diseases dominating global health headlines. A child doing homework by candlelight is not a quaint image. It is a development catastrophe, repeated hundreds of millions of times every night.

More than 700 million people have no electricity at all. Billions more have access that is unreliable, unaffordable, or both. Without power, there are no refrigerated medicines, no functioning hospitals after dark, no productive factories, no air conditioning in a warming world, and no pathway out of poverty. Electrification is not one development goal among many. It is the precondition for all the others.

The Energy for Growth Hub calls this the Modern Energy Minimum—the threshold of reliable, affordable electricity that enables real economic participation: powering a business, running medical equipment, keeping food cold, charging a phone. A single dim lightbulb does not meet it. Most development finance has aimed too low for too long.

What USLNG Can Do

Natural gas is the ideal fuel for closing the energy gap in the developing world. It is cleaner than coal, more reliable than intermittent renewables, dispatchable on demand, and increasingly affordable as U.S. export capacity expands. A nation replacing coal-fired power with gas cuts CO2 emissions by ≈50%, eliminates most particulate and sulfur emissions immediately, and gains a reliable baseload electricity supply that can underpin economic growth for decades.

USLNG makes this possible at scale. The United States is the world’s largest LNG exporter, with more than 90 mtpa of additional export capacity under construction. American natural gas is abundant, competitively priced, and produced under environmental standards exceeding those of any other major supplier. It is governed by binding commercial contracts, not geopolitical caprice.

The nations that need this most include South and Southeast Asia, where hundreds of millions lack reliable electricity and coal remains dominant; Sub-Saharan Africa, where electrification rates are among the world’s lowest; and Latin America and the Caribbean, where energy poverty coexists with significant untapped potential for gas-powered development. LNG Allies works with governments, importers, and development finance institutions in these regions to advance the infrastructure, policy frameworks, and commercial relationships that make USLNG accessible and affordable.

[See USLNG by the Numbers for current export volumes, active offtake contracts, projects under construction, and capacity coming online.]

The False Choice

Some argue that developing nations should leapfrog fossil fuels entirely and go “100% renewables.” This argument, however well-intentioned, is not supported by evidence. Intermittent renewables require grid stability most developing nations do not yet have. Battery storage at grid scale remains expensive. And as Todd Moss and his colleagues at Energy for Growth Hub have documented extensively, pressuring energy-poor countries to forgo natural gas while wealthy nations built their prosperity on it is not climate justice—it is climate hypocrisy.

The choice is not between natural gas and a clean energy future. It is between natural gas and continued energy poverty, continued coal combustion, and continued preventable death. USLNG is not the enemy of the energy transition. For billions of people, it is the energy transition.

America’s Responsibility

The United States is uniquely positioned to lead. We have the resource base, the technology, the export infrastructure, and the democratic institutions that make us a trustworthy long-term energy partner. Unlike pipeline gas from authoritarian producers, USLNG is traded in a global, competitive, liquid market. No single government controls it. No adversary can weaponize it.

The Energy for Growth Hub has proposed U.S. Energy Security Compacts—fast, lean bilateral agreements that deploy American development finance tools (USTDA, EXIM, DFC) to spur energy investment in partner nations, advancing both American economic interests and global energy access simultaneously. This is precisely the architecture LNG Allies supports and has worked to advance through its Credit Readiness Initiative and its relationships with USTDA, EXIM, and DFC.

LNG Allies believes that expanding USLNG exports to energy-poor nations is not only good economics. It is a moral imperative.

To discuss how USLNG can help your nation address energy poverty, connect with LNG Allies President Fred Hutchison on LinkedIn.

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Selected References

Moss, T. (2021). The Modern Energy Minimum. Energy for Growth Hub. [The foundational framework redefining what it means to end energy poverty—a lightbulb is not sufficient.]

Moss, T. (2023). Follow Africa’s Lead: How UK Policies Can Support Africa’s Transition to a High-Energy Low-Carbon Future. Energy for Growth Hub. [Parliamentary evidence submission arguing that prioritizing near-term emissions over development hinders poverty alleviation and climate resilience.]

Auth, K. and Moss, T. (2025, Oct.). U.S. Energy Security Compacts: A Fast and Lean Approach to Reasserting U.S. Interests through Global Energy Investment. Energy for Growth Hub.

Moss, T. (2024, Aug. 06). Washington Needs to Up Its Power Game. Energy for Growth Hub.

Ramachandran, V. (2024, Nov. 07). Why Is the World Bank Spending $12 Billion to Chase Less Than 0.5% of Global Emissions? Center for Global Development.

Shah, R. (2024). Want to End Poverty? Focus on One Thing. Rockefeller Foundation/Energy for Growth Hub.

IEA. (2026). Global Energy Review 2026: Natural Gas. IEA. [Gas demand growth in emerging markets and developing economies.]

IEA. (2024). World Energy Outlook 2024. IEA.

U.S. DOE. (2024). Secretary Wright on Energy Poverty. DOE.

World Bank. (2024). Electrification Data. World Bank.

EQT Corporation. (2023). Unleashing USLNG. EQT.

Energy for Growth Hub. Our Story: The Refrigerator That Launched a Movement. Energy for Growth Hub.