For the average MAGA Republican white guy, they may be “shithole Countries”.
But the most dynamic and rapidly growing markets of coming decades are in the developing world.
They’ve been watching. Taking notes.
The Trump administration’s energy policies have been shaped by gas barons like big donor Harold Hamm and his hand-picked energy secretary, fracking mogul Chris Wright.
Their whole play is to cajole, coax, threaten or force US states and the developing world to build and lock in expensive natural gas infrastructure – pipelines, LNG export and re-gasifying facilities.
They’ve also made it clear that they are untrustworthy, unreliable, and willing to brutally betray anyone that displeases them.
50 years ago there weren’t many other places to go for energy. Now, they have abundant and cost effective clean energy alternatives.
What do you think they’re going to do?
Donald Trump’s war on Iran will have many unforeseen consequences that he won’t like. One of them is likely to be an acceleration of the global shift to low-carbon energy.
As my FT colleague Gideon Rachman points out, Iran has now proven that control of the strait “gives it a stranglehold over the world economy . . . Even if the Islamic republic decides, at some point, that it has an interest in reopening the Strait of Hormuz — it will always want to retain the option of closing it again as a visible threat to ward off aggressors.”
Heavy reliance on imported oil and gas, in short, means a chronic risk of severe and unpredictable economic shocks. The Iran crisis has focused the minds of governments around the world on this problem — and on how clean energy could help them address it.
“I think we should take this opportunity to transition to renewable energy more quickly and at a large scale,” South Korean President Lee Jae-myung told a cabinet meeting as the war escalated.
On Friday last week, economic ministers from south-east Asian countries agreed at an Asean meeting to “accelerate [the] renewable energy transition” to “strengthen regional energy security and resilience”.
Kenyan foreign minister Musalia Mudavadi made the same call to African nations on the same day. “Let us reimagine the future,” he said. “If Africa were powered by clean energy . . . would the Middle East crisis carry the same distressing impact?”
In Pakistan and India, once key customers for the Persian Gulf’s liquefied natural gas exports, energy-hungry industries have been rapidly shifting away from both gas and grid power to make use of cheap, abundant solar energy.
Bangladesh, for years South Asia’s economic success story, made the opposite bet. That was the wrong decision. With the world’s largest LNG terminal, Qatar’s Ras Laffan, shut down and suffering extensive damage from Iranian attacks this week, a fifth of global supplies are now offline.
Solar’s advantages are most apparent in the textile business. Since the Industrial Revolution spread through England’s cotton mills in the 18th century, garment factories have been many countries’ first step toward development. Clean energy is speeding the process.
India’s apparel plants now derive about 28% of their electricityfrom renewables, according to a recent study by Moody’s Corp. affiliate ICRA ESG Ratings. Large factory roofs make installation of solar arrays straightforward.
Plenty are already surging ahead of rich-world companies in their clean power ambitions. Pakistan’s Nishat Mills Ltd. and Interloop Ltd., which supply Gap Inc. and Hennes & Mauritz AB, respectively have 35 MW and 25 MW of photovoltaic panels, comfortably on a par with Tesla. Bengaluru-based Gokaldas Exports Ltd., whose customers include Adidas AG, derives 79% of its energy from solar, biomass and other clean sources.
Open Circuit Podcast – Latitude Media, March 20, 2026:
Jigar Shah: I’m not arguing that point. What I’m arguing is that… Remember, we’re talking about the 50 emerging markets in the world that import oil and energy. That’s who we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about OECD countries. They’ve already built their LNG import terminals, they’ve already built other inland natural gas infrastructure. Right now we’re talking about Kenya or Tanzania or Nigeria or other places. So now the question becomes, they don’t have the money to begin with to build out all of this natural gas infrastructure. They’re getting pressured by XYZ lobbyists or this person or that person to do it. It was hard enough for them to raise the money to be able to do this from private sector capital sources, the guarantees, the this, the that, the IMF, whatever.
And so now the question becomes, if you’re an industrial facility inside Kenya, my sense is that the government is less interested in spending all this effort to get you subsidized natural gas subsidized by the people of Kenya than they are facilitating an off-grid system. This is not about Ember versus Lazard. This is just about, it’s really fricking easy to raise $20 million to actually build a micro grid in rural Kenya right now. I can find 50 people to invest in that. It’s not easy to get a billion of dollars to build out if-you-build-it-they-will-come natural gas.
Michael Cembalest: Okay. Yeah, I’m not sure how much discussions of rural Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique are going to be moving the needle on global energy consumption.
Jigar Shah: That’s where the growth is. That’s where the population is. Everyone else has got a negative burden.