At the very top: "It’s usually made from petroleum, which is better in a landfill than in a tank of gasoline"

"It" being plastic. The common non-plant-based kind.

And later: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."

It's good if there is more demand for non-plant-based plastic, because then we burn less fossil fuel.

>It is dumped in whichever way is cheapest and easiest

The most common way plastic is disposed of is in a landfill. The carbon is being sequestered underground, in other words.

That's most plastic though. Your average soda bottle is not biodegradable on any meaningful timescale.

As the article puts it: "If we're going to extract carbon from the ground at all, far better that it ends up in a soda bottle that will last 400 years than in the combustion chamber of your car."

So while this won't solve it on its own, neither will anything else. We need to start doing what we can and stop worrying about whether it will be enough in isolation.

Suppose I get upset about all the fossil fuel which is being burned and decide to do something about it. I buy up fossil fuel and instead of burning it, I sequester it underground in such a way that it can't be used by drilling companies. This seems clearly good for the environment, no?

"Wasting" plastic does exactly this. If you buy ordinary non-biodegradable plastic, and dispose of it in the garbage so it goes to the landfill, you are effectively buying up fossil fuel which could have been burned, paying someone to transform it into solid form so it can't easily be used as fuel, and sequestering it underground.

Of course it is not a complete solution to global warming. But it is something we should encourage people to do.

Just search for "gas prices" on Google News and you'll see that people are very concerned about the price of gas. Much more than most commodities, actually.