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The White House's official Twitter account sent out something of a mixed message on Thursday. Oil production is at a 24 year-high!, it trumpeted. At the bottom of the tweet, the suggestion you share that news with the hashtag #actionclimate.

President Obama's five-year-old climate tension in one awkward tweet.

RT the good news: For the 1st time in nearly two decades, we're importing less oil than we're producing. pic.twitter.com/M30ewhgKqi — The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 14, 2013

Oil consumption, of course, is one of the primary contributors to the climate change that the wh.gov/climate-change page advertised at the bottom of the tweet exhorts visitors to take action on. The spike in oil production under Obama, depicted in the graph above, has largely been the result of improvements in shale extraction processes. Or, in layman's terms: fracking. The massive boom in the oil industry on the North Dakota-Montana border is thanks to hydrofracturing — and it accounts for a lot of that spike. (At right, monthly production since 1920.) Fracking raises a long list of environmental concerns: water pollution, methane release at natural gas wells, even earthquakes. And, of course, climate change.

Since he was elected, the president has tried to balance two issues: the job growth that has followed the expansion of drilling in the Plains states and the need to curtail carbon emissions to address the changing climate. That's the tension we note above, his attempts to portray himself as hyper-green tempered with deep-rooted caution. Obama still hasn't reached a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, for example — in part due to insistence from business groups that the pipeline's construction will create jobs.