President Obama has called for a determined effort to free America from the hold of the international oil cartel. As his prime measure to achieve this, he has advanced a proposal to create a “cap-and -trade” system to limit carbon emissions. While the president’s stated objective is indeed worthy and in fact critical to the future of the nation, unfortunately, as a means to achieve it, a carbon cap-and-trade system is a complete non sequitur. The cap-and-trade mechanism is primarily a method of constricting electricity production. The United States only gets 3% of its electricity from oil. Thus taxing...