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.
I know it may seem that way if you’re constantly online these days, but in general most people are just people. Like 80% are mostly good, but human, and may have some minor issues. Probably 10% are Jesus-level good, then 10% are sociopathically evil.
Now, if by society you mean “American capitalism”, then yes that favors assholes who care less about their fellow humans. This flavor of capitalism is inherently selfish and greedy, so those who succeed in it are the most greedy and bad people. Yes people care, but the forces preventing anyone from changing it are the strongest in the history of human civilization with technology too now, that makes it borderline impossible to change the underlying system. Only a major catastrophe caused by capitalism where millions of Americans died would cause the general populace to question the system, but honestly even then who fucking knows.