> Or do something wild and have a worldwide monument building contest where captured carbon is used to make incredible sculptures and artworks.
I wondered about the scale here. In 2020 we emitted 34.81 billion tons of CO2 from fossil fuels[1]. Now that's much more than what I can lift, or even imagine. So let's say we want to build Pyramid of Giza sized monuments out of that. The Pyramid of Giza weigh about 5.75 million tons[2].
That means that if we want to soak all the yearly emission into monuments we need to find place for about 6000 Pyramid of Giza sized ones. That's a lot of monuments to go around. And then next year we repeat again. I'm not sure this will scale.
> Injecting it underground is just turning waste into waste, [...]
Yes? That's where the carbon was stored for hundreds of millions of years and it was fine there until one day humans figured out a way to get it out and spread it into the atmosphere. The problem is not that we have a moral objection to CO2 on principle. The problem is that it's screwing up the atmosphere.
1: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
2: https://weightofstuff.com/how-much-does-the-pyramid-of-giza-...