Not to be outdone by the debut of Ford's E85 hybrid Escape, GM made its own environmentally-friendly pitch to lawmakers at the government's own auto show today.

The biggest news was the launch of GM's "ethanol image campaign" - a national push to build awareness and market acceptance for its ethanol/gasoline E85 vehicles.

The automaker's nine-model E85 Flexfuel fleet got a splashy launch at the L.A. Auto Show at the beginning of the month, and now the vehicles will be the centerpiece of a "Live Green Go Yellow" marketing campaign that will kick off during the Winter Olympics in February. (GM's yellow FFV badge, shown in GM VP Marketing and Advertising Brent Dewar's press conference at right, is apparently meant to remind us of corn, the main source of U.S. ethanol.) The campaign will have an E85 website, LiveGreenGoYellow.com, that features (wait for it...) "the GM Cornulator," an online tool that calculates the amount of petroleum saved using E85.

Also announced at the auto show today was the delivery of the first of 50 GM hybrid-powered buses to the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. So far in 2006, GM has 216 hybrid buses scheduled for delivery to six U.S. cities.

[Source: GM]