Exactly - people seem to get a little caught up in the ‘carbon offsets are BS’ narrative (which there is a lot of truth to - a lot of credits in these markets a

Exactly - people seem to get a little caught up in the ‘carbon offsets are BS’ narrative (which there is a lot of truth to - a lot of credits in these markets are grifters selling sham credits, and offsets in general won’t work long term if we don’t massively reduce things like fossil fuel use). But taking it too far can mean they aren’t able to quite grasp this about how the forest works. So you get weird, wrong takes like “because trees eventually die and decompose, a forest stores zero carbon on a net basis.” But you’re spot on - the new forest will absorb a certain amount of carbon, and then should basically reach a steady state where new growth trees are absorbing a similar amount of carbon as the decomposing trees are releasing (more or less on the short term, but should roughly even out over the medium term). Of course, there are sometimes things like bushfires, but ideally forest regrown in an area where there was a bushfire re-offsets that (but you can’t claim that against other carbon you release, only against the carbon released by the bushfire!)