Carbon offsets are sadly hopeless. Let's plant more trees, look the carbon is now tied in nice biomass. Few short decades later: Oops, an entirely predictable fire just released all that carbon back into the atmosphere.

That assuming the tree planting is done correctly, and does not lead to unhealthy fire prone over density, in the chase for an extra buck. Like every financialized enterprise in the history of the world. No, the tree planting people are good people and would never do something like that.

At best these programs are forest preservation programs. That is they attempt to keep the carbon in the forest instead of blowing the forest up for short term economic gain. That is good, we need more of it. But it is disingenous to call them 'carbon capture' and the end result 'carbon negative'.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/27/wildfires-rage-carb...

https://carbonplan.org/research/forest-offsets

For fun, check the effect of the Oregon 2020 Lionhead fire on one of these projects. The fire absolutely dwarfed the carbon offset project, and killed half the trees therein.

https://carbonplan.org/research/offset-project-fire