“Clean-coal technology is something that can make America energy-independent,” Obama says in the ad, which has run on cable channels such as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

“We thought it was a key moment to let people know that we are faced with a climate crisis, and we shouldn’t have any illusion that clean coal exists today,” Hardwick said in an interview.

 

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Portraying clean coal as a mirage, the Alliance for Climate Protection’s first commercial, shown on broadcast and cable networks starting last December, features an announcer showing off “today’s clean-coal technology” as he gestures toward empty terrain. In a new ad now running, an actor playing a coal company executive says, “Don’t worry about climate change, leave that to us.”

The commercials are the start of an ad campaign for clean energy that the group, based in Menlo Park, California, has said will cost $300 million over 3 years. Spokesman Brian Hardwick declined to say how much advertising has been purchased so far. Gore is the organization’s founder and chairman.

“We thought it was a key moment to let people know that we are faced with a climate crisis, and we shouldn’t have any illusion that clean coal exists today,” Hardwick said in an interview.

Gore has called for the U.S. to produce all of its electricity from renewable energy by 2018, instead of “dirty fossil fuels” such as coal and oil.

The coal industry’s commercials tap into Obama’s credentials as a clean-energy advocate, showing excerpts from a speech he gave in Lebanon, Virginia, in September.

False Start

“We thought it was important to do what we could to get another side of the story out there,” said Michael Morris, AEP’s chief executive, in an interview. The industry is trying “to reach out to some of the policy makers” with its message that adding restrictions on coal would damage the already struggling economy.

 

Prospects for the new technology were clouded last year, when Samuel Bodman, Bush’s Energy secretary, canceled plans to build a clean-coal plant in Illinois. The cost of the facility, initially estimated at $1 billion, had soared to at least $1.8 billion. Bodman said funding the technology at multiple plants would be an “all-around better deal.”

The House-passed version of Obama’s economic stimulus plan would provide $2.4 billion for development of carbon capture and storage, according to a summary issued by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat. The version now before the Senate has at least $4.6 billion for that purpose, according to Bill Wicker, a spokesman for Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat.