Have no fear—the end is not near, or here. Victory is ours, Earthlings. Or so the website for the Global Climate Action Summit declared at the end of a week-long series of panels, talks, interviews and informal conversations that brought together dozens of official delegates and hundreds of observers from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

The web text reads, “The tide has turned in the race against climate change.” That was news to me, especially after I listened to dozens of speeches during a couple of daylong marathon sessions last week.

It is true that I was stoned for much of the proceedings. Before I arrived at the Moscone Center on Third Street in San Francisco I enjoyed a legal edible from the Garden Society.

The instructions on the package advised that it might take up to two hours for the edible take effect, but the cannabis-laced chocolate kicked in in less than 30 minutes—and lasted five hours.

Having altered my own inner climate, which was far easier to do than reverse global climate change, I was cool enough, calm enough and collected enough to enjoy the likes of actor Alec Baldwin; chimpanzee champion Jane Goodall; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; former U.S. Senator John Kerry (who helped negotiate the Paris Accords); and a woman from north of the Arctic Circle who explained to me that she and the tribes of the north, and the polar bears, too, have “a right to ice,” which is now threatened by global warming.

If the tribes above the Arctic Circle had a right to ice, I figured I had a right to be high at the Global Climate Action Summit, and to do my best to channel Dr. Hunter S. Thompson—who no doubt would have skewered this event in much the same way the late gonzo journalist skewered the Kentucky Derby and various Republican and Democratic conventions. Let’s start with the sponsors: Bank of America, Kaiser Permanente, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Hundreds of climate-change demonstrators took to the streets outside the event, and hundreds of police officers, too. The woman who issued credentials said, “It’s organized chaos this morning.” On Friday cops, and protesters were gone, except for bearded Bill Callahan from San Rafael who held a sign and told me, “We don’t have enough respect for our planet. We need to protect it and to live responsibly.”

A friend in the city who had offered me a bed for the week, told me as I was leaving his house to go to the Moscone Center, “This whole event is about green capitalism.” I thought about his comment on the N-Judah street car and on the line waiting to get inside the Moscone Center. “Is this event about green capitalism?” I asked Shashi Menon, CEO of a corporation in Iowa that’s developing biofuels. Menon gave me an unambiguous answer.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “We’ll have a better chance to survive catastrophic climate change with green capitalism than with the other kind.”

I didn’t hear anyone inside the Moscone Center mention the words “socialism” or “communism” though a member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communism Party, who was protesting in the street, handed me a brochure entitled “How We Can Really Make Revolution” in which I read “The system of capitalism-imperialism cannot be reformed.” No one inside the Moscone Center wanted a revolution of the sort that the Revolutionary Communist Party had in mind. What sane person would? Communism, Russia style, had been a disaster for the environment and for human beings, too.

What delegates and participants wanted most of all was to survive the kind of storms that were battering the Philippines and that would soon batter the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

Former Vice President Al Gore, who spoke like a man on fire, explained to the audience that, “we are in the early stage of the sustainability revolution which will be as profound as the industrial and the digital revolutions of the past.” Gore lashed out at “heat stress,” “rain bombs and “mud slides,” and lamented the fact that there were “millions of climate refugees” around the world. If there was a new president in Washington D.C., the U.S. would rejoin the Paris accords, Gore predicted. “We have the political will,” he said.

“And that’s a renewal resource.”

Bill de Blasio said that New York was investing 2 percent of its pension assets in climate solutions. He added that it would take “trillions of dollars for decades to save us.”

Jane Goodall has moved on from chimps in Africa. Now, she travels around the world and talks about the need to save forests that are destroyed by the timber industry, and to make way for agriculture, to grow more grains, feed more cattle and produce more beef.

“Don’t eat things that are bad for you and for the planet,” Goodall said. She had stopped being a carnivore, she explained, when she looked down at a piece of meat on the plate in front of her and saw, “pain, suffering and death.”

Goodall allowed that many people in the world “felt helpless,” but she asked the crowd that gave her a standing ovation to remember “the indomitable human spirit.”

The panel of mayors from four continents was a study in contrasts. Annie Hidalgo, from Paris, was the best dressed of the lot—her white high-heeled shoes stole the show—and her smile was infectious, too, though Zandile Gumede, the Mayor of Durban in South Africa looked stunning in the tradition garb for women in her society.

“Sixty percent of the people in Durban have no electricity,” she said. “But we have the same vision that you have here in California.” Sayeed Khokon, the Mayor of Dhaka in Bangladesh—and the son of the former mayor, explained that jobs, housing and hygiene were much needed in his city. “There are too many people in Dhaka,” he said. “They have to be moved to the countryside. If they do they get free housing.”

At the Moscone, Donald Trump was the boogieman. Alec Baldwin was the court jester, Jerry Brown, the gray eminence and John Kerry his front man. Paul Polman, the CEO at Unliver—one of the major global companies committed to sustainability—gave the packed house a real fright when he said, “We’re losing the battle against climate change.” But he added, “The cost of not acting is greater than the cost of acting.”

Near the end of the marathon Summit, Dave Matthews came on stage with an acoustic guitar and said, “We have to bridge the gap between the people who have a voice and those who feel voiceless and who are desperate to act.” He added, “This is a very strange gig” and the sang two spirited songs, including Woody Guthrie’s hymn “This Land Is Your Land.”

Before he walked off the stage, Matthews told the audience that he and Jane Goodall were “going off to drink Scotch.” If they had invited me I would not have had to think twice. But I was okay. I was still stoned, and I was ready to join Jane Goodall, become a vegetarian and do what I could do to restore our deforested planet.

No, I wasn’t a revolutionary. I was merely a restorationist and proud to be one.

Last month Rebuild Northbay founder Darius Anderson was in Washington, D.C. Anderson posted on Facebook that he was in the capital “advocating with caring elected officials and concerned business leaders to help the fire survivors of the 2017 fires.” He did not elaborate on who those business leaders were.

Anderson went on share a group photo, which included a couple of caring local officials—including Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Coursey and Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt.

Anderson’s trip came on the heels of news that Rebuild Northbay had “partnered” with disaster-recovery giant AshBritt to donate $450,000 to rebuild a concrete-and-wood fence along Hopper Avenue in Coffey Park. It’s a pricey deal: the remains of the current wall on Hopper must first be demolished and carted off before any new wall can be constructed.

The move was heralded by Coffey Strong in media reports about the outbreak of corporate altruism on AshBritt’s part. Rebuild Northbay is the nonprofit formed by Anderson and has positioned itself as a post-fire clearinghouse of contributions from individuals and corporations. Roughly speaking, Rebuild exists to help provide bridge funding for fire-related projects and alleviate pressure on local budgets in the process.

But local union advocates want to know why AshBritt is even operating in the North Bay at all? “They are a low-road, non-union, right-wing, ambulance-chasing company,” says Marty Bennett of North Bay Jobs for Justice.

The firm’s arrival locally was met with skeptical eyeballs from the local labor movement, which pushed earlier this year for pay equity for workers hired to conduct the cleanup. AshBritt has been on-scene in the county during clearing of debris from the fire sites. The company has had a pre-positioned contract in the region for the past four years, pre-dating the 2017 fires.

AshBritt Environmental has been a go-to company for FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 and nearly destroyed New Orleans. With the impact of Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas hitting home—and North Bay residents anxiously waiting out fire season—it’s worth asking just what is the connection, if any, between Anderson and AshBritt. The company says there is none.

The arrangement raises questions about who, if anyone, stands to gain from it, besides the residents of Coffey Park. One leading candidate out the gate is James Lee Witt, whom Anderson previously tapped to head his nonprofit. Witt showed up in Sonoma County as a sort of goodwill ambassador who counseled local officials on how to get the recovery right. He has since moved on after a brief stint.

Witt remains a disaster-capitalist power broker in his own right. He is the former head of of FEMA, and a so-called Friend of Bill from Clinton’s terms in the 1990s. As the Bohemian reported earlier this year, he’s also the head of several disaster-services companies, and private-equity funds devoted to attracting investments into large infrastructure projects.

AshBritt was created by well-connected Republicans in the 1990s, an effort spearheaded by former Republican National Chairman Haley Barbour. The company has functioned as a meta-contractor of sorts for other disaster-services companies that do the cleanup work after Mother Nature (or a downed PG&E pole) strikes.

AshBritt was the subject of a New Jersey state inquiry over billing following Superstorm Sandy. When that storm ravaged the Northeast in late 2012, AshBritt was awarded a so-called “piggyback” contract to the tune of $150 million to provide debris-removal services in New Jersey, under the governorship of Chris Christie. A “piggyback” contract means that New Jersey was able to utilize an Ashbritt contract that was already in place in Connecticut. That contract was initially subject to typical procurement requirements.

According to press reports from the Garden State, Christie hired the company after a nudge from Barbour, and immediately after the storm—under “exigent circumstance” rules that don’t require competitive bidding for a new contract. FEMA documents indicate that the agency doesn’t favor “piggybacked” contracts.

State investigators subsequently found that because of errors committed by the monitoring firms, subcontractors working for AshBritt overcharged the state by some $300,000. The money was refunded to the state by AshBritt, says Moskowitz, “and we didn’t ask the contractors to pay it back.”

The companies identified in the state comptroller’s investigation that looked into the over-billing issue were Louis Berger, Arcadis—and Witt O’Brien’s.

Now AshBritt has a partner in Anderson, which at first blush may rough-out the contours of the post-disaster deal-making process in the region; an AshBritt statement from CEO Brittany Perkins that first appeared in the Press Democrat said the company was “proud to partner with Rebuild Northbay and Coffey Strong.”

AshBritt spokesman Gerardo Castillo says in an email that the wall-building project is a go and that the company is “fully committed to the contribution and we are looking forward to the commencement of this construction.” He adds that local contractors Mountain G and Wolff Contracting are on standby, “ready to begin work when the Coffey Strong project managers give them the green light to move forward.”

He says the $450,000 donation is part of the company’s mandate. “We have
a long-standing record of doing
this throughout the United States, given that recovery efforts for communities are long-term as well.”

AshBritt General Counsel Jared Moskowitz says that while the firm has worked with Witt O’Brien’s—”they have monitored us dozens of times,” he says—the company has never contracted directly with Witt O’Brien, which is typically hired by cities or municipalities to provide a monitoring role. “We’ve never hired [Witt],” he says. “He’s never worked for us. We’ve never worked for him.”

And despite the well-publicized announcement of the “partnership” in Coffey Park, Moskowitz stresses that “there is no connection between AshBritt and Darius Anderson. The suggestion that AshBritt made the donation because of some connection to Darius Anderson, is unequivocally false,” he says.

Moskowitz also takes strong issue with Bennett’s characterization of the company as as “right-wing” firm, noting that, for example, AshBritt was a big contributor to Hillary Clinton and is a major donor to the Democratic Gubernatorial Association. Besides his job as AshBritt’s general counsel, Moskowitz is also a Democratic Assemblyman in the state of Florida.

Even as James Lee Witt has been extracted from any local AshBritt-Anderson intrigues, a preliminary review of local post-fire contracts that Santa Rosa, at the request of the Santa Rosa Fire Department, entered into an $89,000 contract with Witt O’Brien’s on June 19 for a professional services agreement “for the production of a city-wide after-action report.”

Correction and clarification: Superstorm Sandy was in late 2012, not in 2013, as an earlier version of this story reported. This story has also been updated and corrected to reflect the nature of Ashbritt’s interactions with Witt O’Brien’s following Superstorm Sandy, and includes additional comments from AshBritt General Counsel Jared Moskowitz that were not a part of the original story.