“stockholders puts their short-term gains above what’s best for the industry and the nation.”
Every time and if you complain you’re anti-capitalist.
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Without incentives, that is usually the case. The primary purpose of corporate leadership is to enhance stockholder value. Unfortunately, some executive compensation plans run counter to that goal.
What is the purpose of building more refineries if the refined products are simply shipped overseas for the highest profit? We need incentives so the United States benefits more by keeping petroleum-based products priced at an advantage for U.S. businesses and individual consumers. We could also require that a percentage of overseas oil be sold at a discount to the U.S. to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
You have part of it backwards: The purpose of building more refineries is to significantly increase global supply of refined products, driving the price down while making the USA a lot of money.
It is true new refineries could be built to more efficiently process our light shale oil, but it is also important to remember that refined products includes huge quantities of products other than fuel for vehicles. Shale oil isn’t so great if you need, say, asphalt. Pushing hard to get heavy crude production up, from Venezuela, is a very very important part of all this.
In fact, IF it looks like Venezuela can be kept stable, even refineries in Venezuela, which might be a faster route to getting production from heavy crude increased quickly, due to (I would assume) less environmental regs’ hurdles, could be a win both for Venezuela and us: Income for them, and lower global prices for refined products, overall. This helps counter interruptions elsewhere, such as the rather impressive collection of attacks the Ukies are whacking the Russians with now, or the nasty problems with terrorist Iran and their terrorist proxies.
So long as we want to keep this a (mostly) free market, the goal should be to increase global supply to keep global refined products prices down. The more we can do it here, the better, but all viable options should be pressed. That also gives us some room to maneuver when it comes to geo-political concerns, such as “taking care of business” with Iran.