Define long-term. If the wood takes 20 years to grow, and is then harvested and made into furniture, and that piece of furniture lasts another 20 years, that's pretty long term to me. But of course harvesting wood to be burned up is a crime.
The fossil fuel we get from the earth and burn, adding its carbon to the atmosphere, was stored there for hundreds of millions of years. That's the long term meant.
Well, the creation of fossil fuels was only possible because certain species of the bacteria did not exist yet back then. It's not like we can create new fossil fuels now. Also, no one cares about "hundreds of million of years" timeline.
What you call a crime I call the lesser evil option for heating my house in the country. The other options are peat and coal, neither of which are renewable on anything like the timescale in which a tree can be grown. I keep it at about 15° in the winter, and if I were to do that with electricity, I could simply not afford to heat, and somebody would be burning coal to make the power, anyway.