In his latest State of the Union address, President Obama praised America’s declining dependence on foreign oil, but stressed the need to focus the country’s resources on relying more on sustainable energy. What did people think of the president’s points?

Juliet Eliperin of The Washington Post’s 44 blog was unimpressed, saying many of Obama’s “proposals amounted to a reprise of past administration pledges.” On Time’s Ecocentric blog, Bryan Walsh agreed that there was repetition when Obama “reiterated a call to end subsidies for oil companies, and to pass the clean energy standard…that he called for last year.”

Kris Bevill at Ethanol Producer Magazine agreed that the country needed to invest in clean energy, but lamented that the president “neglected to include biofuels in his list of domestically available energy sources.” More impressed, think tank Demos’s blogger Amy Traub called the clean energy standard proposal “potentially a game-changer.”

Fact checking website PolitiFact rated “Half True” Obama’s claim that “for the first time in 13 years, our dependence on foreign oil is below 50 percent.” While American foreign oil dependence is at 49.3 percent, PolitiFact points out that “this decline in dependence has occurred since 2005,” four years before Obama took office. The Annenberg Foundation’s FactCheck.org noted that “economists say the chief reason for the declining oil imports is reduced consumption, brought on by the recent economic recession.”

You can find the full text of the State of the Union speech on the White House website here.

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