It has been nearly one year since President Barack Obama spoke in Berlin as the presumptive Democratic nominee. There, he described himself as not merely a citizen of the United States, but as a “fellow citizen of the world.” What was originally a rhetorical flourish has become a particularly revealing indicator of the president’s sentiments on national sovereignty. Look no further than Monday’s seemingly unnoticed report from the American Petroleum Institute that oil and natural gas drilling activities in the U.S. fell nearly 46 percent in the second quarter from a year ago. Drilling now stands at the lowest level since 2003. A small portion of this change is attributable to the drop in the price of oil, but the elephant in the room is Obama-Waxman-Markey, the cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy bill that recently passed the House and is now pending in the Senate. Energy companies know that legislation is aimed directly at them and are reducing drilling operations accordingly.

And for what? This is a sacrifice that will force American consumers to pay much higher energy bills. Yet cap-and-trade proponents seem startlingly comfortable with the fact that no such sacrifice is ahead for the rest of the world. Al Gore happily announced that cap and trade would drive change through “global governance and global agreements.” But these global agreements don’t exist. In sworn congressional testimony, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency concedes that “U.S. action alone will not impact world CO2 levels.”