Oops: A few short years ago, when looking at the future of American energy production, Thomas Friedman failed to notice shale gas

Seach inside the book: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America, Release 2.0 (First published in 2008, then updated in 2009)

Searching the book for "solar" yields 107 hits; searching for "wind" yields 82 hits; searches for "shale" or "fracking" yield zero hits.

Instapundit - January 5, 2012

FASTER, PLEASE:  Shale Gas Revolution Turns Tables On Oil Powers. “Countries that have always depended on imported oil and gas, like Chile, Paraguay, Poland or Ukraine, and especially heavy consumers such as the United States and China, could become self-sufficient in natural gas in the near future and even start exporting it. . . . But the real news from EIA studies is that shale gas is abundant in territories previously regarded as poor in fossil fuels or dependent on imports: China, the United States and Argentina head the list, but large reserves are also found in South Africa, Australia, Poland, France, Chile, Sweden, Paraguay, Pakistan and India.” Quick, Saudis, better fund some “environmental opposition” or all will be lost!

Flashback: Obama's Book List Gaffe - The Daily Beast

Well, here’s a clue. Obama’s spokesman told reporters Monday from Martha’s Vineyard that No. 2 on the president’s list was Tom Friedman’s environmental bestseller Hot, Flat, and Crowded. The only problem? Obama was reading the same book, talking about it, even quoting from it a year ago on the campaign trail.

At an event in Flint, Michigan, last September, the Washington Independent noted that the book was “on his nightstand.” The then-presidential candidate tried to refute the arguments of the “Drill, Baby, Drill” crowd by touting Friedman’s environmental bestseller. “He calls it E.T., energy technology,” Obama said of Friedman.

Shale gas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Shale gas was first extracted as a resource in Fredonia, NY in 1821...

Early federal government investments in shale gas began with the Eastern Gas Shales Project in 1976 and the annual FERC-approved research budget of the Gas Research Institute. The Department of Energy later partnered with private gas companies to complete the first successful air-drilled multi-fracture horizontal well in shale in 1986....

Mitchell Energy utilized all these component technologies and techniques to achieve the first economical shale fracture in 1998 using an innovative process called slick-water fracturing.  Since then, natural gas from shale has been the fastest growing contributor to total primary energy (TPE) in the United States, and has led many other countries to pursue shale deposits. According to the IEA, the economical extraction of shale gas more than doubles the projected production potential of natural gas, from 125 years to over 250 years