oil and gas companies should be paying for building, launching and operating these birds and the data should be publicly available - this way they'll have at least somewhat proper incentive structure in place.
I mean pay for it by all means, but that's where they stop. And even that's dubious, because it's never as simple as them handing over money; there will be terms and conditions.
And of course, corruption would be widespread; the people working for this company monitoring methane emissions would get money or other benefits offered to them. And when you think about it, relatively speaking, people don't cost much.
I'm confident I'd be up for hiding some data or other dodgy shit if the money was right. Think getting a bigger house kind of money.
The "terms and conditions" would be "pay the tax or go to jail".
The evil and greedy people at the helm of these companies cannot be trusted with the responsibility of managing our planets resources without oversight.
What we need is an incentive for the O&G companies to be squeaky clean and to rat each other out.
Align the incentives.