Leonardo DiCaprio Is Seeing Green

By Stephen M. Silverman

08/14/2002 at 10:00 AM EDT

While this Christmas Leonardo DiCaprio will appear in not one, but two big features -- Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can" and Martin Scorsese's "The Gangs of New York" -- the "Titanic" star, 27, delivered an early present to President Bush: an invitation to attend the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, later this month. The Associated Press reports, however, that it was something of a backhanded invitation; DiCaprio prefaced it by taking a swipe at the American environmental record. "Mr. Bush, we're asking for your support, to be the President that looks toward the future," DiCaprio said this week at a rally organized by Global Green USA, an affiliate of Green Cross International, according to the AP. The president has yet to declare whether he will join some 100 world leaders at the summit, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mexican President Vicente Fox and French President Jacques Chirac. At the Los Angeles rally, DiCaprio also reportedly bashed the Bush administration for not supporting the Kyoto Protocol, an international climate treaty with mandatory controls for industry "despite the fact that we are the biggest economy and the biggest polluter." As noted by the AP, White House environmental experts have criticized the Protocol, saying it would cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars and millions of jobs.