Just a note - 100k jobs aren't that common in software in the UK. Perhaps they're there in finance but there are a lot of people looking for software jobs now who accept much less. I've managed to avoid the finance sector my whole career in the UK by working for telcos, since I felt that, for me personally, finance was intensely boring and motivated by all the worst and most short term values.

IMO the whole attitude to finance here is difficult because not enough people have become rich through software/electronics to be angel investors. It's still a place where the big old money comes from people in banking. The arts are respected, being rich is respected, but the rest of us are still "techies" and that's an attitude prevalent throughout the population. The person who fixes your washing machine gets called an "engineer."

It's a matter of who has the power.

Success breeds success and we have had some great ones - it's just that the whole economy is still skewed towards finance. People want the pound to have a high value. Investment comes here to seek "safety". Costs are high. Everything is short term. We have "spaffed billions" on leaving our local trading bloc but moan a lot about investing in HS2. In other words we're not really united and trying to build a future. The population is aging and some of it thinks "only a few more years for me" and "I'm alright jack".

Do I really know? This is all just the bullshit whirling around in my head.

There's a chance with net-zero. It will require huge investments. If you want to do hardware then I suggest you think about that. Octopus Energy's Kraken system, heat pumps that work together to spread out demand over the day, home energy controllers, battery chargers ...who knows. One word of warning though: I'm actually from Africa and any idea that ends with "....for disaster relief in Africa" is a mistake. If your idea only works in poor countries then I think you'll never make any money. Nobody really cares significantly about disaster relief, especially the potentates of those countries who have allowed the disastrous situations to occur through their own mismanagement.