An independent arm of the Republican National Committee began running its first advertisement on Saturday night, spending $3 million on airtime for the ad to run in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The ad, titled Balance TV, calls John McCain a crusader for climate change, unlike his rival Barack Obama, which the ad claims is following Democrats in refusing to allow more gas production at home.

McCain is "pushing his own party to face climate change," says the announcer. "Barack Obama: Just the party line.

Obama's campaign responded with a long list of positions McCain has taken that the Obama camp says would raise prices for gasoline.

"What we need to solve our energy crisis is an honest debate about the choices before us, not more attack ads that mislead voters about the facts. There's a real choice in this election between John McCain's promise to continue the Bush approach of trying to drill our way out of our energy crisis -- which even he admits won't lower prices this summer -- or Barack Obama's plan to provide meaningful short-term relief for our families and to make a historic investment in alternative energy development that will create millions of new jobs, keep the cost of energy affordable and secure our energy independence once and for all," said Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan.

The RNC's independent expenditure unit was set up to satisfy the Byzantine rules of U.S. campaign financing, which limits to about $20 million the amount of money the party can spend in coordination with the McCain campaign.

The McCain campaign has no involvement with the ad launch undertaken by the RNC's independent expenditure unit, or any other activity it may undertake.

In fact, neither does the RNC itself. The independent expenditure unit, as the name implies, is walled off from the RNC and the McCain campaign. The RNC merely hired the group to decide what the ads should say and where they should run. The group is then given a checkbook and that is basically the end of the RNC's involvement.

FOX News' Corbett Riner contributed to this report.