Trees are cheap and effective, but humans are destructive. If we just left nature alone, cut meat production to a level where we could pull everything back to older fields, it would recover relatively quickly.
Meaning we need to prosecute and take punitive actions against humans and corporations who just can’t cope with not being destructive. Any business that’s willingly involved needs to lose everything. Make it impossible to profit from, remove the incentives for farmers when the money disappears and loans can’t be given out because the banks stopped existing.
The trees would die and rot at some point, which releases the CO2 they stored. We cannot keep capturing CO2 without increasing forest areas, and that’s expensive. However, artificial carbon capture does not fare much better so the best strategy is to just burn less stuff. It is still more effective to offset fossil fuel power plants with clean electricity (as long as there is no oversupply) than using it for carbon capture.
Trees replace themselves. So yes, forests store carbon, rather than specific trees. Also, dead trees don’t just evaporate into the atmosphere. Other species eat them, etc. Over time, more and more carbon will be stored somewhere, if it’s left alone.
Dead trees don’t evaporate (except for some of their water which isn’t too relevant); the decomposing (micro)organisms that eat them release CO2 - about as much as burning the trees would. Yes, an old growth forest will be storing more CO2 per unit of area than a newly created one but that does not increase very fast and after a century, the forest will have reached most of its carbon storage capacity it will be able to store for the next millenium - at this point, basically only oxygen-free peatbogs where dead biomass does not decompose (as the decomposers cannot breathe) will provide extra carbon storage. This will eventually turn into coal (and sunken sealife into oil), storing its accumulated energy as hydrocarbons that won’t be touched unless some pesky intelligent species start an industrial revolution.
Carbon capture is expensive: you need to isolate CO2 from the atmosphere, which takes energy, and turn it back into solid or liquid chemicals, which by laws of thermodynamics takes more energy than burning that amount of corresponding hydrocarbons. Then they need to be stored somewhere where nobody will find and burn them to enjoy cheap energy from them like we’ve been doing for the past 200 years. So we’ve had cheap energy at the expense of the environment, and we need to expend at least as much energy to get all that nasty carbon back out of the atmosphere. Thunderf00t made a very informative video about all this.
