That's logically equivalent to saying your car won't run out of gas because on balance there's always exactly as much fuel going in as being burned. It's missing the point.
The issue here is that a farm "stores" very little carbon, as most of it gets re-released at the end of the season when the crops are harvested and decomposed in some way back into atmospheric carbon. A forest, on the other hand, continues growing for decades as a net carbon sink. All the carbon it absorbs stays in the forsest as biomass (and metabiomass stuff like peat and logs and soil).
A mature forest, effectively, has a much larger "tank" for the carbon that doesn't involve storing it in the atmosphere, where we don't want it. Farms don't.
Seems a lot like that would turn atmospheric carbon into a building material.
So, if you subscribe to a dead-tree newspaper, it might be better for the atmosphere to throw away the paper instead of recycling it.
That carbon will go back to co2 again if the wood rots or burns - but not when it dries.
Yes, that's correct - that plantation, in itself, has zero net loss of carbon once it regrows.
What you're missing is the activity in the meantime that contributes carbon to other cycles of carbon heat trapping.
So when all is said and done, sure, that forest is back where it was with the same amount of carbon - but the permafrost it helped melt (with accompanying release of methane) is still melted.
If at every moment someone is selling a stock, someone else is buying it, this argument would say the stock is worth zero. Because for every person trying to buy it for X someone is “buying it” for -X.
But of course, X is what matters. That’s how we calculate market cap and it measures overall effects
Selling “it” for X is not buying “it” for -X. It's buying X for “it”.
More specifically, if A sells X to B for Y, A gives up X for Y implying Y is worth at least X to A (and X at most Y), While B gives up Y for X, implying that X is worth at least Y to B (and Y at most X.)
Hence, that trade occuring in market where X and Y have access to all potential purchasers and sellers of X and Y fixes the value of X equal to Y.
I'm not sure I understand... To me, the only question is, how much CO2 we store per km2 (which might be a higher number for a natural forest). The plantation being cut down and then regrown has 0 net impact, just like trees dying and new trees growing in a forest. The plantation being cut down and not regrown has the same negative (+CO2) impact as the forest eventually being burned/cut down.