In recent years, turning up at high profile events in a Toyota Prius has become almost de rigueur for Hollywood celebrities who want to show off their green cred. However, for someone who's made obscene amounts of money for playing pretend, tooling around in something as mundane as a Prius doesn't do much to show the world that you've made it. For that you need something with a little more substance and perhaps a three pointed star.

Since most of these Hollywood "beautiful people live in California, any viable alternatives have be available for sale there. Mercedes-Benz is now offering an option to these folks which is by no means as efficient as the iconic hybrid, but certainly delivers more of the ostentatiousness that might be expected in this market segment. Recently the likes of Naomi Watts, Kyle MacLachlan and Gary Oldman have been turning up driving Mercedes-Benz BlueTec diesels like the ML320 and E320. While these vehicles are not in the same green class as the Toyota, the do offer the other attributes of a Benz with much better fuel efficiency than gasoline-powered alternatives.


[Source: Mercedes-Benz]

Do you enjoy watching stars on the red carpet? Well, BMW thinks that they can help make the stars' appearance a little greener than if they arrived in a stretched limo (even if it's hybrid). Last year BMW chose the event to promote its Hydrogen 7 flagship, but this year BMW has announced a full "fleet of models fitted with EfficientDynamics" to drive around movie starts and politicians. As we know, this name denotes a combination of the Bavarian marque's techniques to lower fuel consumption. According to BMW Italia's press release, when 2008 ends, BMW will have saved enough fuel to power a city like Geneva, Switzerland, for one year. Not sure how they arrived at that tidbit, but there it is.

[Source: BMW Italia]

We've seen countless celebs go green by either choosing to drive in a hybrid vehicle, electric car or even a scooter. The latest well-known person we've heard has made the change to two-wheels might not be a celebrity by the strictest definition of the word, but we're sure you know his name: Donald Rumsfeld. We're going to leave any political bits out of this post and just suggest that it's nice to see well-known people make a fuel-saving purchase. The specific scooter model that Mr. Rumsfeld, former Defense Secretary of the United States, has chosen is the Vespa LX150. The fine-looking Italian is a capable mount and features a 150cc four-stroke engine which powers the metal-bodied machine up to around sixty miles per hour. Riders of scooters such as this one typically report fuel mileage of around seventy miles per gallon, which surely makes the Vespa Rumsfeld's most efficient ride.


[Source: Yeas and Nays via Jalopnik]

Click on the image to see more celebrity scooter riders

The list of celebrities driving hybrids - the Toyota Prius especially - is rather long and seems to be growing every day. There's another list, though, which shows that celebs often enjoy life on two wheels. The choice of transportation for famous people? Scooters. While most of these people could surely afford the latest and greatest motorcycle on the market, it seems that they prefer their open-air experience more on modern, twist-and-go style scooters. So, who's on the list? (Deep breath!) We've got Owen Wilson, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Jay Kay (front-man for the band Jamiroquai), Ellen Page (on a moped no less), British pop star Robbie Williams, Naomi Watts with Liev Schreiber, James Gandolfini from the Sopranos and a question-mark-covered Matthew Lesko. Surely this isn't a complete list of scooter-mounted celebrities, but it does show that famous people have the same choices in transportation as the rest of us.


[Source: The Scooter Scoop]

I'm not sure how I feel about writing this... I mean, I've never been inspired to do anything by Lindsay Lohan before. I'm not so sure that I want to be either, but oh well. Unlike (prepare for an obscure reference) Isabelle Tyler from The 4400, I have only had one chance to grow up in this world, and I have seen the media in general focus largely on matters that do not... uh, matter. Is this how it was for the rest of our readers? Has anything changed? I know that there was the hippy movement back in the '60s and '70s when my parents were growing up, and to some extent, the green movement today seems a bit like that. Back then, there were any number of suitable "causes" to get behind, and the same is true today. Sometimes, smaller groups choose to focus on one in particular, but, by and large, the media seems to focus on celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. Even we have gotten in on the game, because our readership is interested. Lohan wonders why. She even feels bad about it. Lindsay would rather have the focus on "the other things that are important, like global warming." So, is she right? For whatever reason, we, as a society, do care what she's doing. If we didn't, it wouldn't be on the news. Deny it all you want, but I can say with certainty (because I can see the numbers) that our posts on celebrities tend to get just as much, if not more, traffic than our posts on what really matters. To be honest, though, I've decided that I am all right with it. Honestly, I wouldn't have written about Jennifer Aniston, Paris Hilton or now Lindsay Lohan if I didn't care, so I am just as guilty as those who choose to read about them. So, I guess the thing to do is be entertained by those trivial pursuits and to really care about the important stuff. Our brains are powerful enough to sift through it all and decide what to focus in on. So, let's get back to global warming now, shall we?

Side note: obviously, whatever Lindsay might have done to try and get the spotlight off of here and on global warming, it must have backfired. That quote was made before her last run-in with the police.

[Source: Ecorazi]

We always like to report on celebrities driving hybrids, and now we can add two more to the list. But, this one has a twist! The celebs are a couple, and they are sharing their Prius between themselves! What could be better than driving a Prius? Sharing a Prius, of course, and that is exactly what Hollywood couple Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O'Connell are doing. According to this article, Rebecca was the green one of the family, and she seems to have talked some green sense into her new husband. Jerry admits to driving the Prius, and he is actually filming a new movie called, oddly enough, Carpoolers. Jerry also said that he gets "angry if people don't recycle." Rebecca says of her husband, "Jerry decided to put solar panels in." Sounds like the transformation is complete!

Below, you will find a few stories of other celebrities who choose to drive green. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a start:

• Paris Hilton gives up her Range Rover for an Escape Hybrid, is scared for the environment
• Owen Wilson thanks Woody Harrelson for turning him on to the green
• Jennifer Aniston joins the growing list of celebrities driving the Prius
• Celebrity roll call: who's driving what to help the environment?

[Source: Ecorazzi]

The lovely Jennifer Aniston, neighbor of Prius driver Leonardo DiCaprio, has replaced her Range Rover with a Toyota Prius. There is not much more to add to the story, other than the fact that she more than doubles her fuel efficiency for less than half of the price of the large SUV. Somehow I doubt that the money savings were very high on her list of reasons to go the environmentally friendly route, but, what do I know? Am I rambling on just to fill up some space so that my text is at least as long as the picture I included to the right? Maybe. But, it did work, didn't it!

[Source: Ecorazzi]