Since burning releases CO2 into the atmosphere, are there alternatives to burning? Maybe it's difficult to do something with the vast amount of dry wood/plants, even if one manages to collect them?
Burning will return what the tree pulled out of the atmosphere, so it's already carbon neutral.
Decomposition and fertilization (eg hugelkulture) will also release greenhouse gases. So, again, carbon neutral.
Pyrolysis allows you to produce synthetic gas, biochar, and energy from the wood. Biochar is a useful industrial and agricultural product, and it's pretty much just solid carbon. Hypothetically you could bury it and be carbon negative, but there isn't really anyone doing that at scale.
You could also bury the wood deeply enough that it wouldn't re enter the carbon cycle, but wood is heavy, large, and difficult to move around.
I hope your down voters realize the intent of your question (can we sequester the carbon from forest waste/slash rather than releasing it?) and adjust their votes.
Couldn't you make the same argument about burning literally anything?
Doesn't burning oil just return carbon to the atmosphere that was already in the atmosphere at one point anyway?
One thought that crossed my mind was if a burn after collecting the debris can be used for energy generation with proper emissions filtering/control etc. That would also offset other energy related emissions. But as someone below writes perhaps the collection and transportation of the debris would take more energy than what this would generate.
This is just an excuse to burn. There is not good CO2 molecules and bad CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. More CO2: bad. Less CO2: good
The problem is that we’ve been pulling up buried and fossilised trees and burning them, which introduces excessive amounts of CO2 and ruins the natural balance of the carbon bank.
It would be nice to think about maybe collecting undergrowth and turning it to charcoal in something like a kiln and then burying it - reverse coal mining. Of course, we'd want to stop regular coal mining first.
Deforestation and pulling old oil & coal out of the ground and into the atmosphere is what tips the balance.
You’re not comparing no-CO2 to some CO2 (and CO, and everything else, etc). You’re comparing some co2 to unbelievably large amounts of CO2 (etc)