At Slate, Matt Yglesias argues that recent fluctuations in the price of oil are a reason not to launch military strikes against Syria:
CNBC reports that oil prices are falling on the news that the UK parliament voted against military action in Syria. That’s after several days in which rumors of war had sent oil prices up.
Oil often comes up in Middle Eastern geopolitics, but in a sense I feel like it rarely comes up directly enough. For starters, these market moves are at least decent evidence that observers who are neither “hawks” nor “doves” but who do have money on the line feel that bombing makes the region less stable rather than more stable. More straightforwardly, they’re also just a sign that war could have a meaningful deleterious impact on the American economy. Higher oil prices are a negative supply shock to the United States that would slow job growth and reduce real wages.
This isn’t a foreign policy blog, so let’s leave the merits of a Syria strike to one side. Yglesias is right to note that a big jump in the price of oil would slow job growth, reduce real wages, and generally be bad for the American economy. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that the functional equivalent of a big jump in the price of oil is something that many liberals have been advocating for a long time. The whole purpose of putting a price on carbon (whether via carbon taxes or cap and trade) is to increase the cost of fossil fuels so that people will be forced to use less of them. That will lead to slower job growth, reduced real wages, etc. for precisely the same reason that a spike in oil prices would do so (except that a carbon tax would make non-oil powered energy like electricity more expensive as well). On the flip side, if Yglesias is right that attacking Syria would mean higher oil prices, then it is also the case that attacking Syria would mean lower carbon emissions (because people would be able to less of the things that cause the emitting). So from his perspective, shouldn’t increased oil prices be a positive aspect of military intervention, rather than a negative?
“