After MTV announced last week that they were doing a special edition of Pimp My Ride in honor of Earth Day this weekend AutoblogGreen had an opportunity to talk to Ian Rowe, MTV's Vice President of Public Affairs.

AutoblgGreen: We're talking today with Ian Rowe the Vice President of Public Affairs and Strategic Partnerships for MTV. Ian, why don't you tell us first about the Break the Addiction campaign. I suspect there's probably a lot of people who read AutoblogGreen who may not be familiar with it.

Ian Rowe: Well, about a year ago, we were really analyzing what were the issues that young people were speaking about and concerned with and it was very interesting that they were speaking about their concerns about what they've heard about this thing called global warming. But typically they saw images of polar bears or ice caps that were melting and not really clear as to how those issues were actually relevant to their day-to-day life and issues like the war in Iraq and our dependence on foreign oil and how that put us in situations that as a country threatened our national security. We saw an opportunity to really help young people connect the dots, that somehow their daily behavior actually was related to all of these things, that they were simple things that they could do in their daily lives that would not only help to preserve the environment, but to could save them money, improve their health and improve the general welfare of this earth that we live on. Simultaneously the President talked about the country needing to break our addiction to, America's dependence on oil, so we saw an opportunity to launch a massive campaign that we decided to call Break the Addiction to deliver literally every single day. So 365 days of very pragmatic simple tips that any young person can do in their daily life, whether it be, car pooling, saving water, using a different kind of shower head, using different kinds of bulbs, but all very simple things that the audience could do as a way to easily bring them into what is now a larger conversation and a larger understanding of the issues of whether or not we-if we collectively engage in these kinds of behaviors, we can have a substantial impact on preserving our environment.

Continue reading the interview with Ian Rowe after the jump