It’s not easy right now because of the funding and political climate, but you can find work where success is measured by metrics like “gallons of diesel not burned.”
Start here: https://climatebase.org
You point at the actual problem yourself: political obstruction and funding going to the opposite.
The relevant issues here are ironically precisely those you can solve by discussing them on the internet.
They are caused by people not thinking right and having their emotions cross-wired.
They can be solved by correcting those errors in reasoning and setting evaluations right. Via discussion.
Rather than using reason to get people to surmount their "emotions" and to "think right", I'd argue we rather need to frame the issue in terms of their self-interest, and to try to persuade and convince not them but rather their tribal leaders.
We shouldn’t HAVE to do this, our politicians should represent our desires and our long term necessities. But that’s clearly not an easy problem to solve, and it sure doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction.
So RND to push the economy makes perfect sense to me as a way to fight this from the other direction.
Making electricity more 'green' is of course necessary but on the backdrop of the current capitalistic system, it will simply lead to more electricity being consumed. See current uptake by LLM data centers.
The good news: there’s a lot to build, a lot to invent, and a lot of work to do, and the solutions to these problems are not present in the training data. If you’re worried about how you’re going to pay the bills now that AI ate your job writing glue code for some niche subscription SaaS product, here’s your answer.