The federal Environmental Protection Agency has announced that from now through August 15 it will use infrared cameras mounted on planes to identify large emitters of methane from oil and gas wells in the Permian Basin, an area spanning west Texas and east New Mexico that supplies about 43 percent of the oil produced in America.

The concern is that methane, a powerful “greenhouse gas,” contributes to dangerous global warming.

It’s true that methane is about 30 times more powerful, molecule per molecule, than carbon dioxide as an infrared-absorbing gas. However, anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are about 300 times those of methane, which makes methane’s contribution to global warming only about one-tenth of carbon dioxide’s. Further, Physicists William Happer and William van Wyngaarden calculate their combined global warming effect at 0.12°C (0.216°F) per century, with carbon dioxide’s at 0.0108°C per century and methane’s at 0.0012°C per century. Neither one of those by itself nor the two combined are dangerous.

Granted these facts, it’s hard to figure any rationale for the EPA’s move other than its being yet another front in its war on fossil fuels.