So, I think it's worth talking about CO2 and other emissions (particulates, etc) separately. I totally agree that wood isn't great to burn from the standpoint of all the other stuff that goes into the air. And I agree that it's not a very efficient energy source either. It makes sense to use if you're chopping down trees near your rural home and burning them for heat in winter, but not as, say, a source of fuel for a power plant.

But I think that it's accurate to say that when you burn wood, you're emitting CO2 that would have been released as the wood decayed anyway. In that sense, you're not really contributing to climate change. This doesn't count any energy used in harvesting and transporting the wood, which of course could contribute to emissions.

To use another example, if you grow sugar cane, and using green energy sources, turn it into ethanol, and burn that in a car instead of gasoline, that's basically carbon neutral. If you hadn't grown the sugar cane, something else would have grown there, and decayed, and released the carbon into the atmosphere.

It would be valid to argue that if we had let the field turn into a forest, it would trap more carbon than the sugar cane would. And we should let forests regrow, where we can! But it's a one-time thing -- once the forest is grown, it would stay stable in the amount of carbon captured there. To continue to trap carbon, we'd need to keep harvesting the trees and doing something with them to permanently take them out of the carbon cycle, like turning them into buildings or somehow turning the carbon in them into something that doesn't decompose and burying it.