You missed my point. The comment about university was not an insult to imply you’re not educated, it was to state that I don’t believe you couldn’t figure out what was meant by “petrochemical”.

Interestingly, in a post where you claim to be wholly incapable of making any sort of inference if so much as one word is slightly off the correct technical term, you then chose to make a huge inference about the subtext of my comments

I maintain my original position, which is you knew what I meant to say but instead of correcting me that ‘petrochemical’ is not the correct term for oil and gas, you played dumb and now you’re just doubling down to save face when even though you lost none to begin with.

I like you Dr. C, I don’t really want to argue with you especially over something so silly. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

I believe in my post that I named the region between Boston and Washington as the obvious choice for high speed rail. I've got no idea why it wasn't done years ago given the fact that Europe has clearly shown the advantage of the system.

Also measuring the speed of rail against aircraft does not tell the whole story. Getting to and from airports is a major slowdown. Rail gets passengers downtown to downtown with a minimum of lost time. In fact if you check travel times in Europe using Google you will find that rail compares very well with air travel. Paris to Rome, for example claims 90 minutes for travel between the two points by plane, but if you add on three or four hours for airport navigation the advantage shrinks. And on shorter distances like Paris to Marseille the time is almost the same. I recall an episode of Top Gear in which the three stooges raced one another from London to some place in Northern Italy (I forget which city) each using a different mode of transport (car, plane, and train) and they all came in within a few minutes of one another.

As for acquiring land for rail I guess you would have to ask the Europeans how they do it. I don't expect it would be difficult given that rail lines already exist. I believe for whatever reasons the US missed the boat on high speed rail.

In any case I am not going to worry about just one aspect of green technology. You can argue about high speed rail all you want, but it takes nothing away from the other half dozen or so advantages green tech has over conventional technology.