Canada's global environmental reputation needs the scrutiny of the "Honest Prophet" — someone who can call an emission an emission on behalf of civil society
There's a critical linkage between honest brokering and honest prophesizing and Dr. Thomas Fox is a great example of how the two concepts work hand-in-hand
Can a for-profit company succeed in the “honest brokering” space?
After all, doesn't the very notion of “profit” imply a sense of self-interest at odds with honest brokering?
How about the idea, then, of the honest broker’s twin, the honest prophet? You know, someone, or something — like a company — driven by a sense of the greater good?
Are they not linked by the concept of “social profit”?
Like the honest broker, the honest prophet is about transparency, in terms of foreseeing and foreshadowing a future state in a way that’s good for all who must deal with that future.
And there can be profit in transparent prophecy — because the profit motive drafts in behind the prophetic motive. In other words, the honest prophet puts social profit before commercial profit.
The notion of the honest broker is ageless — the idea of someone, or something, with no-dog-in-the-fight save the best possible outcome for all parties to a negotiating process.
University of Colorado political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. popularized the honest broker notion in 2007 with his thinking around the role science and scientists play at the nexus of policy and politics. He continues to advance that “pracademic” agenda in various spaces, including the climate conversation. (See his Substack here: (5) The Honest Broker | Roger Pielke Jr. | Substack)
In many ways, honest brokering and honest prophesizing are just opposite sides of the same coin. But honest prophesizing is not so ageless — in fact, I just conceived it — and yet it lends a future-state focus to the sense of brokering.
And while being a prophet typically invokes a sense of religiosity, there are secular prophets aplenty. These are folks whose prescience takes us to an understanding of a future state from which we ought to know how to act in the present. But these prophets didn’t necessarily see themselves as brokers simultaneously; that the two roles have an iterative duality in that they move from brokerage to prophecy and back to brokerage and back to…you get the drift.
You become something of an Honest Prophet when your crystal-ball gazing is driven by a sense of forecasting for the greater good — and you’re brokering in the present to ensure the ideal future manifests.
Here's a secular example: Highwood Emissions Management, a Calgary-based consulting, data, and software firm that also focuses on learning and thought leadership.
Its president, Dr. Thomas Fox, is both an honest broker and an honest prophet. He understands where science sits at the increasingly complex nexus of policy, regulation and environmental good – and he forecasts to a future state and backcasts to the present. Thus, he is both broker and prophet.
Have a read of this editorial he produced recently, in which he cogently argues the case for what Canada’s needs to do in the interests of its own honest brokering and prophesizing in the global emissions space. The emissions standard he references are both brokering and prophecy tools.
Over to you, Dr. Fox.
Does Canadian natural gas have lower methane emissions than the rest of the world? Who knows?
As a PhD student working on methane, I recall hearing claims from regulators and industry representatives that Canadian natural gas boasted the world's lowest methane emissions. At the time, the assertion seemed plausible, given Canada's early adoption of stringent regulations and visionary policies enabling the use of alternative methane monitoring technologies and a robust regulatory offset market. However, almost a decade later, Canada still lacks the necessary data and methodologies to substantiate claims about the low-methane performance of its gas.
Canada is not entirely to blame. To prove our industry's relative performance, we must use a common standard for measuring emissions, one also used by the countries or regions we compare ourselves against. Unfortunately, we have been missing both a standardized set of measurements and a framework for interpreting them to draw inferences about the performance of entire regions, industries, or countries. Additionally, many other gas-producing nations have been slow to adopt robust measurement practices, preventing meaningful comparisons.
To make matters worse, industry, government, and society have grown increasingly confused as diverse new measurement technologies provide emissions estimates that are inconsistent with techniques used for regulatory reporting. A company’s (or a country’s) ‘true’ emissions are therefore unclear, complicated by a combination of imperfect engineering equations, immature measurement capabilities, and extreme spatial and temporal variability in emission rates.
Fortunately, emerging initiatives and data could enable Canada to establish itself transparently and credibly as a global leader in low-carbon energy. For instance, the MiQ-Highwood Index, released in June 2023, provided, for the first time, a measurement-informed national-scale average methane intensity for the US of 2.2%. Unfortunately, no similar credible estimate currently exists for Canada. With new methane regulations currently in development both in Canada and the US, and with the emergence of new public datasets that greatly exceed historic estimates, we must think carefully about how we acquire, interpret, and disclose emissions data so that our claims are seen as credible.
The key to communicating Canada's narrative to the world lies in adopting new international standards for measuring, quantifying, extrapolating, and disclosing emissions from the oil and gas (O&G) industry. Canadian companies and academics are actively contributing to the development and implementation of these global standards to enable benchmarking of companies, O&G supply chain segments, specific commodities, and entire countries in their emissions performance assessments. Pertinent examples include the GTI Energy Veritas Protocols, the United Nations OGMP 2.0 methane reporting program, and the MiQ Standard for low-methane gas certification.
Through these standards, the world is transitioning away from rudimentary "bottom-up" accounting frameworks grounded in industry-average assumptions, as currently used by Canadian regulators, and towards company-specific carbon accounting based on emissions inventories informed by site-level "top-down" measurements. In the US, intensity-based targets, backed by empirical data and the best available quantification methods, are replacing traditional emissions reduction targets expressed as a percentage of an elusive and unmeasurable baseline, as done in Canada.
Until now, Canada's credibility in backing up its performance claims has suffered due to inadequate measurement and reporting of emissions. To stay competitive, we must shift towards reporting methane intensity using a common language accepted and understood by international stakeholders. This requires empowering Canadian industry to develop and maintain measurement-informed emissions inventories aligned with international standards. Failure to do so will result in new public datasets with satellites and aircraft revealing the real story to the world, likely harming Canada's credibility.
To address these challenges and seize the opportunities ahead, I urge the governments of Canada and Alberta to embrace measurement, transparency, and credibility by taking the following steps:
Conduct a review of emerging international carbon accounting standards, assessing their alignment with Canadian requirements for data collection, quantification, and tracking. The adoption of measurement-informed inventories, incorporating site-level monitoring data for large releases, is being pursued by EPA and Colorado regulators, and could enhance Canada's credibility.
Shift towards intensity-based targets instead of vague percentage reductions based on a long-past baseline year. Require the collection and reporting of actual methane measurements to credibly track progress and demonstrate achievement of these targets.
Design, build, implement, and maintain an emissions database to share information and demonstrate excellence internationally, adhering to widely accepted standards and measurement-informed reporting requirements.
Encourage and support operators to join international methane reduction and reporting programs. Other countries have seen greater uptake in these initiatives, such as MiQ-certified low-methane gas in the US (~25% of US gas is now certified) and over 100 companies participating in OGMP 2.0. Regrettably, no Canadian-based operator is currently partaking in either initiative.
By collectively pursuing these ideas, we can foster climate competitiveness, ensure industry health, and facilitate the energy transition in Alberta and Canada as a whole. Moreover, the right technologies already exist to move the needle on both new and existing infrastructure in a cost-effective manner.
It is time for Canada to take a decisive step towards establishing itself as a global leader in low-carbon energy and methane emissions reduction. By embracing new international standards and investing in measurement-informed reporting, we can achieve our environmental goals, enhance our industry's credibility, and secure a sustainable energy future.