The challenge is that old growth forests, while retaining carbon, don’t pull much net carbon from the atmosphere. Their ‘spring’ is nearly fully compressed.

They are really beautiful and important, but they aren’t doing much when it comes to reducing atmospheric carbon anymore.

As ugly as it is, chopping them down (as long as we can stop the wood from rotting/burning/etc) and then having new trees grow in their place does more actual atmospheric carbon reduction.