Oil is close to $100 a barrel as the Middle East is imploding, and President Obama wants to raise taxes on domestic oil and gas producers. Such taxes would, if approved by Congress, make the country more dependent, not less, on imported oil. In the 2012 budget he sent Congress earlier this month, Obama proposed to raise $3.6 billion in 2012 and $46 billion over the next decade from tax increases on oil and gas, more than on any other industry. The ostensible rationale is, as Obama put it, that “we are eliminating subsidies to fossil fuels and instead making a significant investment in clean energy technology — boosting our investment in this high-growth field by a third — because the country that leads in clean energy will lead in the global economy.”

No mention, of course, of the distortion of investments to support Obama’s goals “of the United States becoming the first country to have one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015 and for us to reach a point by 2035 where 80 percent of our electricity will come from clean energy sources.”