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If you plant a tree, let it grow and then burn it the whole process is carbon neutral, the tree captured the carbon from the air to grow. If you burn existing

• pdpi 7y ago
  Plants capture CO2, but not CO. Wood burning produces both CO2 and CO (with the balance between the two depending on how well ventilated the burner is), so the whole process still ends up producing pollution. Also, even if the process as a whole is a net neutral over time, the system requires some amount of CO2 buffering in the atmosphere. The more you use wood as a fuel, the more CO2 you'll have in the atmosphere as part of this buffering. Or, put differently — "net neutral" just tells you that you can reach a steady state, but doesn't tell you how heavily polluted that steady state is. Higher numbers of wood burners in use still translates into a more heavily polluted steady state.