First, I love the energy. To your last question, if you can get into the right industries, then you can absolutely push forward solarpunk ideals. However, in many cases it entirely depends on where the funding is coming from.
I’ve been an ML engineer for a long time. If you work in a company or organization at an entry level, it’s not really up to you how much the work will contribute to any specific ideals you have. However as you gain more experience, make connections, and yield more power overall, you can shape projects or entire portfolios towards solarpunk, assuming that fits within the constraints and meets requirements. The high level work shaping step usually takes many years and lots of experience to reach though.
I’d recommend specializing in some engineering discipline with some applications in mind, as that’ll give you much more direct experience and make it more likely you’ll get hired by a company/organization that does “solarpunk” research and development (R&D), and testing and evaluation (T&E). I’m assuming solarpunk tech = any kind of renewable energy or environmental improvement capabilities.
They know Trump is just a blip in what is otherwise a strong climate change mitigation desire in the world as a whole. They don’t want to make themselves a target of the MAGA cult, but once he dies and the cult implodes, they can go back to sharing it openly.