You can think of industrial CO2 use as basically the same as nitrogen but a little worse and several fucktons cheaper.

CO2 is fairly inert. This makes it useful. Welding steel is a typical example of something you can use CO2 to shield. There are many other examples in the chemicals industries of things like that where you want to do something at a "higher than natural on earth" temperature to make a reaction happen or happen faster but you don't want that reaction to happen with oxygen all around.

And on the other end of the temperature spectrum....dry ice.