There appears to be two camps of people in this debate. Those who expect corporations to behave according to the ethics and morals of society and those who believe corporations should attempt to extract as much profit as possible.

To those in the second camp I'd ask, why shouldn't society seek to place limits on corporate behaviour when it believes that behaviour is harmful to the long term goals of society? Why should the profit motive be put before social need?

Without social and governmental intervention we'd still have cigarette companies paying doctors to promote their products as safe and healthy. We'd still be experiencing crime waves brought on by leaded gasoline and fireproofing would still be made from asbestos. Should the government and activists have allowed these things to continue? If not, what differentiates them from expecting Ikea to responsibly manage it's consumption of lumber?

> _Note: A tree is useful and carbon negative only if it is growing a tree in forest that has stopped growing is mostly useless for offsetting carbon,_

Don't trees grow till they die?

I think the point is that after it dies frequently it will release all the stored carbon back into the atmosphere. In the case of turning the tree into furniture its really what happens at the end of the furniture's life. If it ends up buried in a landfill then the carbon is probably sequestered for a few hundred years, but if it ends up going through an incinerator for electricity/etc generation then its not actually offsetting long term.

> I think the point is that after it dies frequently it will release all the stored carbon back into the atmosphere

Only if it burns, dead tree are generally eaten away over decades by insects, fungus and birds.

Rotting, as its known, is just the tree being metabolized by other living organisms. That process is the same as burning except in that the energy is used by the organism. The net result being the carbon being turned into C02 same as burning.

AKA, whether you burn it, or leave it in the environment to rot/compost/etc the carbon eventually turns back into C02. In order for trees to be a carbon sink they have to be sequestered in an O2 free environment forever. AKA, they need to be feedstock for the oil the cockroaches are going to use to build their civilization in a 100M years.