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Matt Damon has become the latest movie star to buy a hybrid car after his family urged him to stop guzzling gas. Damon insists he's not trying to be part of an environmental trend among his peers — he just wanted to save money at the gas pump. He explains: "I just have one for my own personal reasons. I don't have a car in New York but I just got a place in Florida and we (himself and fiancee Luciana Barroso) got a car there and it's a hybrid. My father drives one, my brother drives one. They're like, 'Why would you ever drive a regular car?' There's no reason to. These cars are just as good, they're just as fast and they use less gas, so I don't understand why everyone isn't driving one."
In an effort to attract attention to flex fuels, Damon dresses as a gas pump in one of the campaign’s six webisodes. (Watch it.)
"You hear actors huff and puff about global warming, but you''ll go on a movie set and see like 8,000 Styrofoam cups laying around,"
Damon has supported a variety of charity causes, including Project Phin, a campaign to pressure congress to improve the fuel efficiency of the nation's vehicle fleet and to get oil companies to invest in alternative fuel infrastructure like E-85 (that's 85% ethanol biofuel gasoline) filling stations.
"Currently, there are 4.4 million flex-fuel vehicles on the road, but only 1,000-plus service stations that sell e85 - many of them concentrated in a handful of Midwestern states. California, for instance, has 250,000 flex-fuel cars but only two stations that sell the fuel. New Jersey has 116,000 flex-fuel cars and no stations that sell e85. New York has 170,000 flex-fuel cars and only two stations," according to the Project Phin site.
"In other words, flex-fuel cars provide little reduction in oil use or global warming pollution because they rarely run on e85. The House should make Big Oil sell e85 at a certain portion of service stations so that flex-fuel cars can run cleaner." Joining Damon on the project are pal Ben Affleck and Jason Biggs, Jennifer Garner, Tobin Bell (described by Phin as "the scary guy in the SAW movies"), Jenny Wade and Joshua Jackson.
Matt Damon is a supporter of Project Phin, which is a project of the Clean My Ride/Flex My Fuel campaign, which is part of the Think Progress campaign, which is run by the Center For American Progress Action Fund. If that sounds confusing, maybe that's why the campaign lined up big celebrities to help it get the word out. The point is that the nation needs more alternative fueled and efficient vehicles on the road and a better national energy policy that will help ween us off foreign oil and curb global warming emissions.
