I have never understood this argument with respect to industrial forests. We move all this carbon into lumber, paper and other products, yet somehow it magically returns to the air.

Even industrial forests sequester some carbon in the soil as it seems from my experiences that there is easily 10% of the tree mass that never gets harvested before wind damage or other reasons.

A natural forest is constantly losing trees which turn into soil. Some forests have soil that you literally can sink feet into decomposing trees that you can't even see before falling into them. I might buy the argument that the termites etc recycle the fallen trees back into carbon, except for the fact, that it seems to accrete.

> Moreover forests are carbon neutral - that's why it's called a carbon CYCLE

As is the meat industry despite many citations of a retracted paper - the cows aren't emitting anything that wasn't already in the grass (at least not in the long term). Both however to act as temporary buffers/reservoirs and emitters that can affect things if they are kept around in perpetuity.

Does the time spent in the cow make up for the cow re-releasing the carbon as methane instead of carbon dioxide?

The same carbon was in the air, but not necessarily causing the same greenhouse effect

The methane is only temporary and still maintains equalibrium in the long term - the issue is when we extract/introduce entirely new greenhouse gases to the system (notably oil)

> the cows aren't emitting anything that wasn't already in the grass

This is not true; fertilizer and farm machinery to fertilize and harvest the corn that creates 1/2 the mass of feedlot meat burns a lot of oil. And almost all of American beef goes through feedlots.

Sounds like the real solution is to stop extracting gas/oil/coal from the ground entirely and also plant new fast-growing carbon-rich trees, cut them down, convert them to inert carbon (timber? charcoal? oil?), store the result (underground? as furniture/housing? somewhere?) and repeat the cycle as many times as possible in as many places as possible.

What about carbon capture in the soil? Genuine question, I'm not at all familiar with the science.

Depends on the forest and specific local ecology.

Planting forests definitely is a carbon sink, but the carbon goes into the living biomass. Whether or not you get long term buildup of soil carbon just depends. In other words there’s a sizable one time bonus to planting forests and a conditional long term continuous sink.

People tend to simplify one way or the other.

I was thinking about peat soils - as we know, they're great at preserving organic matter thanks to high acidity, to the extent that they're dug for fuel.

A lot of peats in my country have been drained (and the drainage requires continual maintenance) for pasture, but well, it's rather hard to farm without harming the environment.[1]

But I'm assuming that healthy peat bogs are fixing carbon/ritual sacrifices in a net-negative manner until someone digs it up and burns it.

I just wonder if allowing peatlands to revert for carbon credits would offset the loss of the pasture.

[1]:https://www.ruralnewsgroup.co.nz/dairy-news/dairy-management...

Just a PSA, the term "carbon capture" people are throwing around now almost always means capturing CO2 at emission sources like fossil fuel-fired power plants. It generally does not mean capturing CO2 from the air at large. There really is no viable technology for that. Except trees.

Iirc, that's an old forest thing, and goes away pretty much as soon as the trees do.