A while ago I wrote briefly on why the Singularity might not be near and my estimates badly off. I saw it linked the other day, and realized that pessimism seemed to be trendy lately, which meant I ought to work on why one might be optimistic instead: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#counter-point
(Summary: long-sought AI goals have been recently achieved, global economic growth & political stability continues, and some resource crunches have turned into surpluses - all contrary to long-standing pessimistic forecasts.)
Nitpick:
More energy is good. On the other hand, fracking has less than ideal consequences (mostly pollution, and depletion of ground water, which goes down the fractures caused by fracking). Until we have the crazy technology required to prevent or undo the damage done by this, this doesn't sound like a good trade-of.
I have much more hope in the exploitation of sunlight.
More importantly, unconventional oil and gas are getting produced in large quantities now in large part because of high prices, high enough to justify expensive and difficult extraction processes. Unless costs fall incredibly massively, fracking will not bring back the cheap oil of the 20th century.