Waxman Climate Bill and the War on Trees

I was reading about the Waxman Climate bill and I saw some complaints about the bill not letting them harvest trees from federal land for biomass. My first reaction was: "What do they mean, trees?" I went to look for a copy of the bill and found it here:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h2454/text

Take a look at it and search on "biomass". I discovered you can cut down trees and burn them for energy and get carbon credits for them.

I must have missed something, since I thought the point was to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A live tree is a carbon sink. It takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and converts it to trunks and branches and roots and stuff puts out oxygen for us to breath. Cutting down a tree and burning it and putting the carbon dioxide that it sequestered back in the atmosphere and getting a credit for doing it is perverse.

We should be planting more trees, not cutting them down and burning them for fuel. A tree can sequester carbon for hundreds of years and by then the problem will be solved. We will be out of fossil fuels if nothing else.