Plant matter dies and rots and the carbon escapes to the atmosphere.
Ever since microorganisms evolved to eat dead plant matter the conditions to make coal on planet earth (and to create a carbon sink of buried coal) have been gone.
I'm not particularly strict on the terminology of whether a carbon sink is permanent or not (in my usage above it is not permanent). But yeah we are on the same page regarding the life cycle of a tree now so it is clear.
Most (all?) of the carbon sequestered by a tree that dies and rots on the forest floor goes back into the atmosphere. So the "fixing by all future generations" is just the same carbon sink as the current 1 alive standing tree for that spot of real estate.
Regardless, the net carbon sink of a healthy forest is higher than the net carbon sink of a few houses that were built in its place.
Simply think of the number of tons of wood in an acre of forest, compared with the number of tons of wood in a housing development.
It doesn't matter that some trees die and release their carbon, other trees grow. Instead of thinking of individual trees, simply think of the entire biomass of the forest.
A tiny amount is turned to coal (often via forest fires) which then isn't returned to the cycle. We are talking about -0.1C over thousands of years though, if we otherwise went carbon neutral - which seems unlikely for the long tail of small users but if we get the major uses of fossil fuels to something carbon neutral that would get us very close to stopping global warming at least.
About the only thing I agree with you in terms of repurposability would be the vertical column. And even then, you have to find the right buyer. For everything else, my intuition is the shredding it down for recycling is by far easier than repurposing. I haven't done any math on it though.
I'm sure if you filled a field full of 8.5 x 20/30/40ft slices of blade someone would buy them for something. Interleaved and stuck in the ground as a retaining wall or similar seems like a fairly obvious choice.
Any screeching about quality or defects can pretty much be overcome by just using more since they're waste after all.
I've been thinking about the AI gains a lot. If individual developers became, say, 20 percent more efficient at coding, the organization would potentially see even more gains, because all of the reduction in time spent coordinating between people. I.e. a 2-man task that needed 20 man-hours of work, 8 of which hours of work were just communicating, becomes a 1-man 10 hour task. Kind of an extreme example, but communication and coordination is extremely inefficient a lot of the time!
As far as I understand, the most common achievable choice is between staffing a hospital with 3 8 hour shifts per day or 2 1w hour shifts per day. Studies have shown the 12 hour shift system has better outcomes.
It also makes me wonder how different the packing efficiency would be- gas station fuel dispensers have short hoses and lots of safety features related to avoiding a spill, and it all takes up space. A fast EV charging station might still look more like a parking lot.
The majority of energy expenditure is not acceleration and deceleration (especially on an EV with regen braking). At moderate and high speeds wind resistance dominates. At slower speeds rolling resistance is a largish factor.
