I'm not talking about putting gas into holes in the ground and then expecting it to not bubble back out and/or kill us. I'm talking about recarbonizing farm land, which we will need anyway to deal with climate change, aforestation, and probably accelerated rock weathering.
It took us 200 years to break it, we'll probably be 300 years fixing it, at which point the ocean will have likely absorbed all it can and started giving it back to us.
The silver lining is that if world population really has peaked and we are on the decline, we can follow the model of Christchurch and The Netherlands and refuse to let people rebuild in the most vulnerable areas. We can return those areas to nature and in some cases, like the Netherlands, use those areas to also improve the chances to survive the next extreme weather event. Every time the a Netherlands declares a moratorium after a flood, their ability to avoid flooding in population centers improves a little bit. And the reforest land which helps a bit with the drawdown (asterisk for methane production, which may represent less carbon in the atmosphere but a greater greenhouse effect)
It’s too late for the pebbles to vote. It’ll take as long as it takes. And it will seem like it will take even longer because we will need to find new physics, chemistry, biology, and manufacturing to solve it.
It took us 200 years to break it, we'll probably be 300 years fixing it, at which point the ocean will have likely absorbed all it can and started giving it back to us.