I think this is partly why he believes wood burning can be worse than coal. Yes in theory growing trees and burning them is closed-loop ... if you assume the trees are grown right next to the power station and requires no energy input to grow or move them, which isn't the case.

Coal is very energy dense. Imports and other automated machinery like wood-cutting machines, planes for seed planting all burn oil. If you import coal and import wood, you could end up burning a lot more fuel with the wood option.

Now, that's kind of a tricky form of accounting because it would make wood burning worse from the perspective of the importing country only. But the carbon was still pulled out of the atmosphere in the exporting country.

The real reason wood burning/planting doesn't make much sense for reducing emissions is just one of scale. You end up needing to plant billions of trees to balance even just airline travel, let alone everything else. There isn't enough space short of terraforming deserts and other very energy intensive activities that probably wouldn't balance.

This is true, but where I live, leftover plant matter, typically from logging, is routinely just burned. Capturing that energy is a win up to the point it takes more to capture than it produces.

Wouldn't it be better to return that organic matter to the soil?