There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
I can say from personal experience this is not true! You can help fix other people's mistakes! I was an energy engineer for a while.
You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste. I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.
But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.
Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.
Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!
Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)
There are ways to have children without creating your own.
That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.
There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival for all through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce because we'll never get all parties to agree.
The only path forward is to hope we have some very clever science and engineering that can help us survive this disaster.
It's a farce because it's already too late for emissions reductions to cut it. We need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or, as you say, engineer other solutions.
But a robust solution is not going to be limited to the physical/material domain. Societies are malleable and so are people. We need to design ourselves and our activities into a vibrant planetary ecology, not throw up our hands and try to patch around historically contingent circumstances
As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and change is not to be reacted to, but to be shaped
Could we come back from it? Hard to say.
If anything, we will not have enought humans around with our birth rate.
Technology is getting cleaner and cleaner each year: ev, solar panels, etc.
Look into Tony Seba for the energy revolution And joan Lomberg about what are our most important problems and solutions
I think we should put far less energy on climate change and more on our human problems: war, famine, poverty, corruption, etc.
Plus someone in your position doing a great job could probably save a ton of carbon from hitting the atmosphere.
If you make fewer mistakes than the person who replaced you if you quit, you will make up for your mistake eventually.
You should have no guilt over this (although efficiency is always to be aimed for). And carbon is probably the least objectionable byproduct of burning the bunker oil that fuels ships - you can't make anything that heavy burn cleanly without insane combustion temperatures.