Forest != forest. Many of the new forests that were planted in the last few decades were basically tree factories. These forest don't help with biodiversity and don't help with CO2 capture as much as mixed forests.
Right, and the fact that that wood is destined to be harvested means it's not really long-term carbon storage, either.
Doesn't stop them getting carbon-capture government subsidies over here in Australia either. :(
If it’s going to be harvested for building materials (rather than as fuel), why wouldn’t it be carbon storage?
Define long-term. If the wood takes 20 years to grow, and is then harvested and made into furniture, and that piece of furniture lasts another 20 years, that's pretty long term to me. But of course harvesting wood to be burned up is a crime.
The fossil fuel we get from the earth and burn, adding its carbon to the atmosphere, was stored there for hundreds of millions of years. That's the long term meant.
Well, the creation of fossil fuels was only possible because certain species of the bacteria did not exist yet back then. It's not like we can create new fossil fuels now. Also, no one cares about "hundreds of million of years" timeline.
We can pump CO2 back into depleted gas fields, it's one of the solutions for storing captured CO2.
What you call a crime I call the lesser evil option for heating my house in the country. The other options are peat and coal, neither of which are renewable on anything like the timescale in which a tree can be grown. I keep it at about 15° in the winter, and if I were to do that with electricity, I could simply not afford to heat, and somebody would be burning coal to make the power, anyway.
While tree farms do exist, that's not the case for the marginal farms that have been abandoned in (e.g.) New England.