Increased production (and the associated environmental risks) would happen no matter what we were burning. Switching between two fuels doesn't change the amount that has to be produced: if for some reason we couldn't burn natural gas, the same increase in energy consumption would cause the same boom in fracking other oilfields in order to satisfy the demand for the other hydrocarbon.

Edit: If the concern is that the economics of NG are driving higher consumption, then you've got to realize that you could still reclaim the net win by doing some legal thing to halt consumption. The important variables here are damage per consumption and consumption: you want to lower both, but if an improvement in damage per consumption raises consumption you don't want to go back and make the damage per consumption worse. The only reasonable course of action if the damage was too high would be to go in and say, keep using the least-damaging fuel but you're going to have to burn less of it.