I think you should challenge your beliefs on the statement "plants are carbon neutral", because there might only be two scenarios in which you are right that planting something and planting nothing has no difference:

1.) If you plant a commercial forest and then cut it down and burn it entirely.

2.) In the cosmic sense that all atoms will return to dust at some point.

In all other scenarios the statement is not helpful in particular because:

1.) Climate change is happening right now and is an acute global crisis which requires extremely short term measures (on an geological time scales). Growing a forest right now, captures carbon now when we need it most.

2.) If you cut down the trees after some time, you can actually just stack the trunks and they will most likely just be inert for a long time. The number of fungi and beetles that are specialized in dealing with decomposing wood is surprisingly low. In comparison to Carbon Capture technologies, which try to capture carbon from air and then store that somewhere, using trees is extremely easy.

There's nothing wrong in growing trees, I love trees. My point was that tree-planting initiatives for carbon capture seem incomplete if they don't address the actual capture (the stockage of the dead wood somewhere safe and inaccessible to decomposition). At that point, you realize that you don't need to wait decades for the trees to grow, you can cut them down and store them right away, letting new trees grow in their place.

Even worse, a focus on tree-planting often feels like an inconsequential feel-good movement, that deviates attention away from the real problem: that every year we are unearthing millions of years worth of captured carbon and putting it back into circulation. Growing a forest while we burn thousands of oil tankers every year is like trying to remove water from the sinking titanic with a bucket. It doesn't harm, but it gets stupidly in the way.

The carbon from a dead tree doesn't just go back into the atmosphere. Most of it stays in the soil.

You are actually spot on

As long as we don't remove fossil fuel usage, planting trees is just something to make us feel better without actually fixing the problem.

Also, you can plant as much as you want, it's going to be much less than what's burned by planters in amazon's forest alone, and they are actually burning the wood.

The main take-away is that destroying something is always several orders of magnitude easier than building that thing, and as long as we don't stop destroying we won't manage to build at a faster rate, therefore stop deluding yourselves.

I think answers need to be comprehensive and not exclude anything. We need to reduce consumption, we need to reforestation, we need to stop burning the Amazon, we need more wind and solar, we need technological progress, we need better power grids, we need better insulation of buildings, we need to eat less animals and travel less. The relative merits of each measure are up for discussion, but it is more important to act than squabble. Planting trees can and should be part of the solution.

Planting trees does do something. There are bigger problems that need to be addressed before tree planting can solve the underlying issue.

Thankfully the amazon reclaims farmland at a scary pace if left to its own devices.

It would be wasteful to cut the plants down and truck the felled trees somewhere, just choose long lived varieties and leave them be.

Or, instead of burying cut trees underground you could build houses from it. That's what we do in Finland where forests are plentiful. This way you effectively capture the carbon for 50+ years, and reduce use of cement which causes significant co2 emissions.

In fact, a well built log house can last for hundreds of years if maintained properly. We have plenty of those with original wood from 1800's. Wood can be used to build larger buildings as well.

New wood treatment techniques even allow for wooden "skyscrapers"

> then liberate all that carbon when they die and are decomposed. No carbon ever leaves the biosphere.

No. They liberate very little.

Bury or sink wood and it will stay put.

(I am not a geologist:) From what I understand, burying wood stopped being particularly effective a few hundred million years ago at the end of the carboniferous era. Before then, plants were producing tons of lignin, which few fungi or bacteria were able to break down. Most coal comes from carbon sequestered in this era. Peat bogs seem to be an exception to this; certainly there are still some scenarios/environments where burying wood will sequester the carbon. Maybe conditions like that could be artificially engineered in other locations.

You are correct! (as far as I know)

You assume the dying trees did not reproduce.

as I understand, the jury is still out on that one: https://news.arizona.edu/story/dead-forests-release-less-car...

More trees, more biosphere