Reading between the lines what I'm saying is: Your benchmark is to do better than wood. If you can make bricks faster than a tree can grow wood, this will become an investment rather than money pit.
Yes.
But the trees usually do this over a timescale of 20-220 years (less when there are fires or climactic change), so are much better than nothing. But they don't count as "permanent".
maybe trees aren't as cool as whatever they're doing???
Most forests in North America evolved millions of years ago to deal with fire to reproduce and keep invasive species culled. Humans interfere with these process in several ways (::grunt::, logging bad, ::grunt::, fire bad, ::grunt scratch::). Studies need to be conducted where we could substitute fire for logging without impacting wildlife. Certain forests would be better candidates for this, but it's also important to make sure slow-growth forests have adequate fire protection to prevent runaway fires.
There's already a lot of momentum with sustainable logging in North America, but it is something that needs to be done in South America and Asia as well.
Logging creates _a lot_ of useful products for people to use, but it requires continuous monitoring and research to keep it green.
But yeah they don't require energy to build them, can be made with simple seeds, integrate really well with local ecosystems (much better than anything man-made), don't need maintenance, self-propagate and cause more benefits like ecosystem diversity, limiting floods and wind.
They do have some drawbacks too though like serious flammability. And we can't burn them afterwards or we'll get all the CO2 back.
Japan actually has an issue now where former tree plantations have overgrown and cause extremely high levels of pollen during allergy season, the forest floors of these plantations are dead due to the overgrowth blocking sun, etc. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VC4gRGPbTqE
The whole planet used to be covered in them and it was not a problem.
The needs of industry and government (which is what you’re targeting if you want to replace construction materials) are optimizing for speed to grow (and hit arbitrary targets), and suitable properties for building, and generally that means they pick a very limited selection of trees that grow fast, sometimes as few as one type of tree.
You’d have to sequester them such that they don’t biodegrade. This involves deep burial, difficult for a solid, or submersion, which means ruining a deep-sea habitat (and creating a carbon time bomb).
If you want nature to do it you need to engineer some way for the carbon to disappear basically forever.
Because it doesn't scale, at least for the purposes of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
because money