I notice this sneaky snarkiness in reportage everywhere. The West's "progressiveness" is flaunted using per-capita nunbers, while the others' "backwardness" is backed up by absolute numbers. Flip the choice of numbers, and the whole picture flips!
All you need to know is whether the big per-capita polluters are driving down their consumption. And they are not, are they?
Well, population density does that, I guess! Not much to be done about it, even in other parts of India with population not as crazily dense as Mumbai.
Between that and avoidable traffic jams created by vehicles blocking intersections, cycling may be the fastest method but also needs breathing more polluted air. But the time overhead of public transport can't be reduced with this population density. So ... a rock and a hard place!
Traffic density doesn't cause any problem, it is slow traffic anyway, especially last-mile localities. Maybe there are no local trains on his route.
The main concern with traffic density would be polluted air, which you'd breathe more of when cycling.
Mumbai has very frequent local trains, right? And buses?
There must be plenty of non-evil companies doing healthy business and giving out good dividends that you could invest in. It would be a bad idea only if you are in an arms race against other investors and they'd make more money investing in evil companies.
Risk seems unavoidable, and you would have to be deliberate in deciding what to invest in. Real estate in climate-change-facing regions too ended up being a risky investment.
I believe most people aren't bad actors. But also, most people can see what is good for them. And cooperatives prove that people can run with it to their advantage.
David Graeber made a very good point that the concept of money is only necessary for war. Take money out of the equation and the next local group will have to stretch to avoid mutual care.
As a long-time toe-dipper in functional programming waters, I am yet to appreciate the gestalt of any individual language. Going by Joey Hess of Debian and Git Annex fame, #Haskell is what is most bang for the buck.
I have found, though, that the most useful aspects, in isolation or in combination, are pure functions, immutable data and pattern matching syntax. Maybe you will find them in a language you like. Personally, I am enjoying foraying into #Prolog and #Erlang (or Elixir).
The big emitters are still shy of discussing per-capita numbers, so those numbers might still be unreasonably high. If only there was reportage of those ...
It is a joke that the colonizers didn't return what they stole, India might have done "better" then.