Traditionally, and by law, FERC has been bound to set electricity prices according to the production source that customers use and the amount they consume.

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But with America now awash in shale gas and the world about to follow suit, the price of electricity is bound to stay fairly low.

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On the other hand, from the perspective of the developing countries like China and India, they're saying to themselves, per capita our carbon footprint remains very small, and we have hundreds of millions of people who don't even have electricity yet, so for us to get bound by a set of legal obligations could potentially curtail our ability to develop, and that's not fair.

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There is also talk of rerouting Iraq-bound trade through Syria to circumvent the Kurdish region, and Turkish government officials have threatened to cut off electricity supplies to Iraq.

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