I, who has written the comment, had the same feeling. I assure you that, being English not my mother tongue, was genuinely curious, but when I've seen the downvotes, I wanted to ask why, then I realized the I couldn't care less. If people feel attacked by a comment and they want to do a reprimand via downvotes let them do it.
Well, if it helps, some solar punk posts like this one go mainstream. I think there's only about 150 active solarpunk members so when a post gets close to 1000 votes that means non-community members are voting.
I've commented on solarpunk stuff that was mildly in capatlism defense (much more controversial than your question), and had great conversations/critisims with almost no downvotes. So I think/hope the downvotes are not from the core solarpunk community. It is still sad, but I would be much more sad if it happened and the main post only had 100 upvotes.