I think carbon capture is a valid approach for power plants and will be effective if done well.
What's not effective are these carbon compensation schemes, where you can pay a few pennies to have somebody sign a paper that they'll let a tree grow for another year, as if that would somehow compensate the release of fossil CO2. It's no better than an indulgence letter you bought from from the Pope.
Every single power plant carbon capture attempt has been a failure, at least as far as I know. If there has ever been a success, I'd love to hear about it to give me some hope
But the biggest failures are all the plants that were announced with CCS and then built without. (Or announced that they'd be retrofitted with CCS which never happened.)
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2021/7/30/the-struggle...
TL; DW: planting 20 million trees would equal roughly the CO2 emissions of the USA for half a day.
The optimum would be to bury the harvested forest in a deep, deep hole, where light and water can't get, and seal it there permanently.
Imagine you have a bathtub with a closed drain and an open faucet. It starts to fill with water. This proposal is an equivalent of putting a bucket in that bathtub, filling it with water, and then putting that bucket on the floor. Yes, it took some water out. No, it doesn't matter, because the faucet is still open and more water keeps flowing.
The solutions that matter are ones that involve reducing emissions - at the very least, making them grow linearly instead of exponentially - and those that continuously remove carbon from the air. With forests, that means continuously growing them, cutting them down, and burying the wood where it can't decompose.