In his opening move of the 2012 campaign commercial chess match, President Obama is pushing back against the Solyndra scandal and promoting his clean energy agenda with his first television ad.

And while Republicans are already blasting the ad as a defensive play by a president who is trying to get out in front of one of his major vulnerabilities, the environmental community cheered the first television spot from Obama's $220 million campaign machine.

"It is the talk of the office this morning," said Melinda Pierce, a lead lobbyist for the Sierra Club. "Folks are pretty pleased he's going out strong on clean energy and taking the Solyndra controversy head-on, not backing down from what we think is a winning agenda."

The 30-second ad begins by decrying "secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama with ads fact-checkers say are not tethered to the facts."

On screen is a reference to the $6 million television ad campaign that was launched Friday by Americans for Prosperity, the well-funded conservative interest group with ties to the Koch brothers. The Americans for Prosperity ad charged that the decision to provide the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar energy company with more than half-a-billion dollars in government loans was the result of cronyism and "politics as usual."

Obama's ad goes on to cite statistics showing that millions of jobs have been made possible by the government's investment in the clean energy industry, and a narrator notes that for the first time in 13 years, U.S. dependence on foreign oil is below 50 percent.

It is a topic that is especially pertinent today, one day after Obama denied a permit for the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline between the Canadian oil sands and Gulf Coast refineries. Project supporters have framed it as a way to put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work at a time of stubbornly high unemployment.

The ad, which will reportedly run in a handful of key battleground states that Obama won last cycle -- Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin -- comes less than a week before Obama heads to Congress for his annual State of the Union address. Pierce hopes that the choice of timing means that Obama will not shy away from his clean energy agenda in his address next week.

"It puts me in the mind that he is really going to own this issue," Pierce said. "He made a hard decision, and he rejected the pipeline, and it looks like he's staking out some turf on clean energy."

But opponents say the ad is clearly a sign of weakness from a president who believes he needs to defend his record even before he has a Republican opponent.

"The ad underscores the audacity of the President in defending his decision on Solyndra," said Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), who has been leading the congressional probe into the bankrupt company, in a statement. "The Obama campaign cannot ignore the facts on Solyndra -- the Administration pushed through this loan with inadequate safeguards that resulted in bankruptcy, an FBI raid, and taxpayers losing over half a billion dollars."

Americans for Prosperity described the commercial as an "attack ad."

"We will not allow the President to run from his record on Solyndra; a stunning example of government cronyism that cost taxpayers over 530 million dollars and cost over 1,000 Americans their jobs -- all in pursuit of the President's global warming ideological agenda," the group's president, Tim Phillips, said in a statement today. "We will continue to support private industry and job growth, even as the President blocks efforts like the Keystone pipeline that would create good paying private sector jobs and help our economy recover."