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In fact, I took his statement the other way:

At one point, there was some n amount of CO2 in the air.

A tree was planted. Through a few biological cycles, CO2 is exchanged and stored as various sugars within the wood.

Burning the wood releases the CO2 back into the air.

This is a net zero process.

On a large enough time scale burning coal is net zero, too. (It's just, that we don't care about these scales.)

The impacts of release (or sequestration) on those scales on other ecological systems are non-trivial. Which is why we care about those releases.

I happen to agree with you; just pointing out what I thought OP meant.