This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

When we expect normal people to limit their own desires and act in a way that is good for the rest of us, we threaten them with fines and prison if they don't cooperate. When we want large corporations to do right by society, we apparently have no choice but to bribe them.

Not so great from an ethical point of view, but it can work.

For example, Utah Senate Majority Leader Ralph Okerlund, a Monroe Republican, is sponsoring Senate Bill 102, which would give oil refineries in Utah huge tax credits if they would update their facilities to produce the much cleaner-burning kind of gasoline our polluted state really needs.

It's called Tier 3 fuel. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has mandated that all oil refiners operating in the United States start making it in large quantities because it will, especially when burned by the federally mandated Tier 3 generation of automobiles, cause a lot less air pollution.

But the federal fuels mandate applies to the overall production of each corporation, not each and every refinery. And the refineries along the Wasatch Front, though they may loom large on our horizon, aren't a big enough share of their owners' total capacity to matter in making Tier 3 goals.

So it has seemed unlikely that the newest generation of fuels would be made here. Which made it unlikely there would be much of it for sale here, where it is needed the most.

Which is ironic, as Tier 3 was one of the few federal mandates most Utah officials had anything good to say about. Gov. Gary Herbert has been jawboning refinery owners and, in his State of the State address last week, announced that the local Tesoro will "make this transition."

This please-and-thank-you approach is forced on Utah because federal law precludes states from issuing their own fuel mandates. (California is an exception, having been grandfathered in by the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005.) Without that pre-emption, it would make sense for Utah to require that refineries around here shift the lion's share of their production to Tier 3, and to pay for it themselves.

Of course, even if Utah had that stick in its kit, it's unlikely that the same Legislature that can't even keep its building codes up to date would issue such a mandate.

Either way, the best Okerlund can suggest is the carrot of hefty tax credits, up to 50 percent of the $100 million or more a refinery upgrade might cost for conversions made before 2020. After that, available credits will shrink.

It's basically offering to go halfsies with the refineries to get them to do what they ought to be doing anyway. But it's also an important recognition that the benefit of cleaner air to the whole of Utah is worth paying for.