>there are very few actionable suggestions.
The actionable suggestions of a carbon tax and land-value tax have been proposed to deal with our largest environmental problems since decades ago and the progress has been agonizingly small. It's not surprising people are frustrated [1].
You can't preserve the atmosphere, oceans [2] and wilderness -- which by their nature are not owned -- within the legal-economic framework of ownership and exchange. Even if something happens to be both profitable and climate-friendly (like electric cars), the benefit to emissions is accidental, and this kind of coincidence does not provide a path to a general solution to the problem, because we cannot simply hope that happy accidents will occur whenever we want them to. It's a textbook tragedy of the commons, but there's no practical way to "de-commonize" and sell shares of ownership in the atmosphere, and anyway exercising control over those shares would just turn into a second government, because practically nobody does anything that doesn't involve the atmosphere.
There are all sorts of interesting innovations that might replace contemporary technologies in a more sustainable future, but since the market price of those technologies does not reflect the environmental benefits they offer, there is no guarantee they will be successful in the present economic system.
I think one misleading historical phenomenon was that around the '70s a bunch of left-wing activists started to raise alarms about running out of various resources: hazards which would fail to materialize. But capitalism is pretty good at managing resources when the availability of those resources follows a smooth price-supply curve, which is true of almost all natural resources which are not byproducts of other resources. However, the same was not true with ozone, it wasn't true with sulfur dioxide, and it won't be true with carbon dioxide either. Even Hayek admitted air pollution was a problem.
[1] These are the wonkish eco-capitalist approaches, which earn the ire of populists because they can sometimes put pressure on people who are sympathetic, or seem to be unfair when contrasting a few anecdotal experiences. But if you are going to talk about "hacker spirit" and "realistic, productive tradeoffs", these are precisely the kind of ideas you asked for, and you are precisely the kind of person who should be advocating for them. Obviously the crunchy crowd wants green jobs or whatever.
[2] The absence of a corresponding tax (cf. carbon, land-value) suggests a new Pigouvian tax: some kind of liquid efflux tax. But this is extraordinarily hard to quantify.