...it's difficult to take you too seriously. No, I don't work for the fossil fuel industry. If I have any allegiance, it's to solutions that are free of politicians (who clearly do have allegiances) picking winners and losers for me.
As for the CO2 myth: Part of the beauty of the CO2 argument is that it's practically possible to make nearly any argument you wish by merely cherry-picking your data. My sources of choice for this are:
www.freakonomics.com/2009/07/24/high-speed-rail-and-co2/
webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/rail/researchtech/research/newline/carbonimpact.pdf/ The latter was sponsored by the British government; people who know something of HSR, and are hardly known for their free market radicalism.
And you're right about fantasy load factors. The only rail in the world that is truly carbon-competitive is in Japan; where they literally pack people in like sardines. I doubt people here will find that any more desirable than they do even the worst of airlines.
I do agree that as long as gasoline remains relatively inexpensive, there is little need to build this. But consider this: Europeans pay twice what we do for gasoline, and yet that doesn't stop auto and air travel to continually increase in relationship to rail travel.
