Will Lefties Now Love Fracking After Obama Blesses It?

The American energy industry is letting out a collective "Is he f**king kidding?" this morning after hearing Obama's taking credit for and ballyhooing progress in hydrocarbon development last night in the SOTU. There has been no US administration more hostile to the exploitation of our domestic hydrocarbon-based energy resources than that of Barack Obama. (Mark Perry has more on this.) So what to make of this:

President Barack Obama, in a State of the Union address delivered 11 months before election day, pushed drilling for natural gas in shale formations as a potential boost to the economy.

Hydraulic fracturing, which injects a mix of water, sand and chemicals underground to free gas trapped in rock, could create 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade, according to a White House document released before Obama’s speech. The process, called fracking, is among a list of energy policies Obama said would fuel economic growth.

First option of what to make of it is obvious - he's lying. The current Democratic Party has a few sacrosanct principles, one of which is that all hydrocarbon energy is bad. He could be using this as a talking point about jobs for campaign purposes but have no intention whatsoever to be amenable to fracking.

Second option, it is now an officially acceptable tenet of progressive orthodoxy to embrace the natural gas revolution brought about by the technology of hydraulic fracturing.

What's your guess?