Fox News host Sean Hannity and California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently squabbled over U.S. energy independence. Today I explain the reality of the situation.
Following last week’s Republican debate, conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity and California Gov. Gavin Newsom discussed some comments Mike Pence made on energy independence. Pence said that when Donald Trump was president, “We achieved energy independence. We became a net exporter of energy for the first time in 75 years.” Pence went on to claim that we lost our energy independence under President Biden.
I addressed this previously in Debunking Mike Pence’s Misleading Energy Ad. Newsom echoed the points I made in that article, saying, “We are more energy independent today” under President Joe Biden.
PolitiFact subsequently weighed in on the conversation, saying:
“What Newsom’s, Hannity’s, and Pence’s claims all share is the mistaken belief that the U.S. is genuinely energy independent. Although the U.S. has moved toward energy independence in some ways, it still depends on international crude oil for key elements of its energy needs, making the country’s energy market sensitive to overseas developments in energy, trade and foreign policy.”
As a brief digression, the point I have previously made is that it depends on how you are defining energy independence. It’s always important to establish those terms. As I pointed out in the previous article:
“If energy independence is defined to be ‘We don’t import any energy’, then we haven’t been energy independent in at least 70 years. We haven’t even been close, because we import a lot of oil that gets refined and then reexported as finished products.
But if Pence defines the phrase to mean ‘We produce more energy than we consume’, then we were more energy independent in 2022 than we been in at least 70 years.
