You can turn that around just as easily.

If I run off to start a farm, and I buy an existing OTS used tractor, it will have a tank that I can pour almost any flammable liquid into to make it run. If I want to plug the tractor in... well, that'll get the engine to turn over, but it won't get it moving anywhere.

If I build myself a cabin in the woods, I can burn wood or wood pellets to keep cook food, or keep warm during the winter. Alternatively, I could purchase batteries, PV panels, and the necessary charge control electronics, in order to run an electric heater.

Burning recently-alive biomass does release carbon, but it's carbon that was in the atmosphere as recently as a few months ago. It isn't zero emission, but it doesn't contribute a long-term increase to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Other emissions like particulates can be worse from wood burning. And most of the CO2 is likely to have been collected over a much longer period than a few months. Without a significant tree planting effort it is likely to increase CO2 levels.

Burning dead leaves actually does count as carbon neutral. The balance is whether you burn fossil fuels, not whether or not you burn anything at all.

No, this does not work.

A forest is a carbon store. Burning trees puts carbon from this store to the atmosphere.

To count it as carbon neutral is an accounting mistake, that could be very costly...

Burn the dead leaves and you shrink humus (or annihilate it, depending on how much you do it), another huge carbon store. So that makes it yet another accounting mistake.

More generally, it is good practice to separate well atmospheric carbon (CO2) and captive carbone (anything in solid/liquid state). Just show that faithfully in the accounting method, and a lot of good will follow.

You are mistaken. I don't have the time right now to explain in detail but it really is quite simple: burning new forest is carbon neutral.

https://wood-energy.extension.org/is-burning-wood-carbon-neu...

You are thinking about the set of two actions {growing a forest from bare ground + burning it}. That indeed would be zero-emission.

But burning a preexisting forest is cancelling an existing carbon store and converting lots of solid carbon into atmospheric carbon.

The fact a forest is a carbon store is precisely why a startup such as Pachama exists: they help grow new forests to capture carbon.

https://pachama.com

Would you then just unnoticingly burn them for energy, and keep telling the customers that you just captured a net amount of carbon?

PS: oh you are jacquesm! :) didn't notice. How are you?

PPS: some critic about the link you sent me ("wood-energy.extension"): I disagree with what they say, in that fallen wood too is a carbon store, and in a forest at equilibrium the amount decomposed by fungi/bacteria is roughly compensated by the newly fallen wood. So that's just a carbon store, and if you begin to burn it you shrink this store.