Have you seen the ads that are blanketing TV attacking the coal industry? Produced by something called the Reality Coalition, they specifically seek to discredit the idea of "clean coal," a term much bandied about in the recent presidential election. You can watch the ad at www.action.thisisreality.org.

I think the coalition's purpose is to "teach" the American public that there is no such thing as clean coal; that no clean coal technology is really in development; and that if we want to survive, we have to shut down the coal industry.

The ad is tremendously powerful.

The ad really offends me. It should offend you, too.

North Dakota and the energy industry need to respond intelligently and forcefully.

In the 30-second video, a plant engineer stands before a coal power plant. He's young, earnest, a little geeky. He's wearing a white shirt and holding a clipboard. He's a briskly efficient professional man. He offers to take you on a tour of a "state of the art clean coal facility." But when you walk through the door of the gray corrugated steel facade, you don't in fact enter a power plant. You are instantly back outside in an industrial wasteland. The tour guide has to shout to be heard, and like a robot, he keeps repeating the phrase "clean coal technology" as if he venerated the very concept.

While he shouts out his love of coal, admitting - as if it were a minor consideration - that burning coal is "one of the leading causes of global warming," we are not looking at him, but rather at the countryside through which he is walking us. "Take a good long look!" he says, while he squats in a yellow-gray blighted landscape on which nothing will ever grow again.

The land in every direction looks like the smoothed-out surface of the moon or a bleached-out Mars, except that it is dotted with some blasted shrubs - mere barren sticks in the ashy ground - with just the slightest hint of green in the shrubs that cling closest to the ground. Message: This is the amount of life the Earth can support if you license any more coal power generation plants.

Then a black screen appears on your TV with the words, "In reality there's no such thing as clean coal."

Leaving aside its truth value, the Reality Coalition ad is an extremely well-made and effective piece of television, and I believe it is going to have an enormous national impact. When I saw it for the first time, paying that half-attention that we have developed as a way of coping with commercial television, I thought for an instant that it was an ad actually produced by the coal industry. You know, one of those "we're doing good things for you" ads you see in the ag and oil industry campaigns.

Here's the hidden message of the video, the "contribution" of this environmental coalition - with close ties to Al Gore - to the energy debate. "These coal guys are destroying the planet Earth. Don't believe what they tell you. They are out of touch with reality."

Choosing the actor who played the coal engineer was a stroke of genius. He's a good-looking guy, and he's clearly a serious believer in coal, not a PR pretty boy. The producers hired one of those hair restoration ad guys who look terrific when they are wearing a hat, and like the actor-director Ron Howard when they aren't.

Later in the ad, when he's wearing his hard hat, the engineer looks good - and young. But at the start of the ad, when he's holding his hard hat in his hand standing in front of the entrance to the future, he looks much older and much less healthy. With his prominent nose, bony forehead and sunken eyes, with his pale skin and darkened lips, he looks, in fact, cadaverous. The subliminal message here is that he is one of the living dead - and of course he is in this instance the "national representative" of the coal industry. He's offering to take you to the Land of Death.

The Reality Coalition would deny this analysis, of course, and insist that I'm "reading into" the video text in a way they never intended. You be the judge.

If there were a freedom of information act for media companies that cater to advocacy groups (from the NRA and the Christian Coalition to the Reality Coalition), we'd all be appalled and fascinated at the same time.

We need a serious national conversation about our energy future. This ad does not contribute to that conversation. It cheapens it. In fact, it prevents it. It takes reason and good sense off the table. It does not deliver its promise of "Reality." It manufactures a gothic dystopia in which the truth is deliberately distorted to short-circuit the debate we need to have about coal and our energy consumption habits.

It fundamentally derails the discussion by appealing not to our heads but to the deepest of all human urges - the urge to survive. The message of the ad belongs to the category of false logic known as "false dilemma." It offers you this choice with nothing in between: coal = death of the planet; stop burning coal = the planet gets to live.

That the ad is deliberately misleading is perfectly clear to anyone who has ever studied the data or driven through the energy crescent in North Dakota. The landscape in Coal Country is not blighted. The rolling hills of North Dakota's Coal Country are covered with grain and grass, as often as not with bold sunflowers. The natural contours of the landscape between Washburn and the Badlands are especially beautiful. The Missouri River flows with serene majesty right next to some of the power plants. Even they, if the truth be told, in some light and from some angles have a kind of industrial beauty. This is not T.S. Eliot's wasteland.

If the folks who made this ad visited North Dakota and spent a few days in the countryside that surrounds our seven coal plants, I wonder what "defense" they would craft to justify their naked piece of propaganda.

We need a thoughtful, well-informed national dialogue about the future of energy: coal, oil, natural gas, wind, nuclear, hydrogen, biofuels. We need the environmental community to be a central voice in that debate. We need the environmental community and concerned citizens to raise tough questions about effluents, mining techniques and reclamation, and regulatory compliance. I am particularly worried about air quality here in North Dakota. But how can the environmental community (or at least this coalition) be expected to be taken seriously if it refuses to debate with integrity?

We also need to have a very sober, look-into-the-mirror, discussion of the energy and environmental implications of our way of life. If we want to continue to live at this level of material opulence and conspicuous consumption, with our SUVs lined up in Wal-Mart parking lots next to trucks filled with merchandise manufactured in China, the Earth is going to take a hit. Al Gore is right about that, and he's a very valuable figure in the global environmental debate, if he will just agree to play responsibly.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He also is the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)