Meenangadi, India In November 2015, Thomas Isaac, a 64-year-old economist and finance minister for the Indian state of Kerala, traveled to Paris to present a paper on waste disposal at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. He came back to Kerala with an audacious plan: Turn Meenangadi, a south Indian settlement of some 34,000 people, into the country’s first carbon-neutral village by 2020. India is battling a pollution crisis. The country is poised to overtake