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They're not.

Yes they are.

And no, shipping is not a major contributor to the price of locally produced bread. Wow. That's some exceptionally daft analysis.

Nice straw man fallacy!

most of the logistics centers seem to forego rail spurs, but there is a reason.

Yes, the reason is the massive subsidies that trucks enjoy. Why pay for a spur out of your own wallet when the government will build you a road out of theirs? Simple economics!

In pounds-per-square-inch, sure, buses cause more damage to roads. However, in terms of MPG per person, a bus yields far better efficiencies.

https://truecostblog.com/2010/...

Buses: At average passenger loads, buses achieve 3262 BTU per passenger-mile, or 38.3 pmpg. Per BTS data, buses average 6.1 diesel mpg, or 5.5 gas mpg. With a full load of roughly 60 passengers, a max pmpg of 330 is possible. The huge difference in average and max pmpg implies that buses are usually almost empty – perhaps smaller mini-buses should be used by more fleets.

[1] Electrical energy is created by burning fossil fuels in a power plant at 40% efficiency, followed by transmitting it to your house at 93% efficiency, and using it in an electric vehicle at 92% efficiency, providing a total efficiency of around 34% for an electric vehicle. Crude oil refineries operate at 75% efficiency, and gasoline distribution might cause another 6% energy loss. Since internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient, total efficiency would be around 14%. Assuming that the natural gas and oil to power our vehicles comes from the same well, we can directly compare these efficiencies, and thus conclude that electric vehicles are significantly more efficient.

I pulled it long ago from the sources cited in that footnote (along with all the car analogies used here on Slashdot). 6 years old, but I dont' think ICEs have changed much in that time.

A brief search was too hard for you, so here's your citation.

Airplanes are more efficient than buses. Not by much, so if they put crappy airplane seats in buses and sold them to capacity, it would probably be more efficient and suck as bad as planes. Trains are significantly better and boats are really really efficient. It's hard to be a boat for powered travel.

I think that figure was for the ratio of wear between all other vehicles and heavy trucks. Here are some sources for more details:

Road wear from Heavy Vehicles - an overview (PDF warning)
US DOT article
Some guy's blog that shows how that 99% was calculated

Hell, it's even a higher chance of getting struck by lightning than getting killed by a terrorist...

Chance of getting struck by lightning in a year 1 in 1000000 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_strike )
Chance of getting killed by a terrorist 1 in 20000000 ( http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/06/chances-of-dying-in-a-terrorist-attack-number/ )

Some more statistics on helthcare-risks http://www.washingtonsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/CDC-Mortality-CHart.jpg

http://terrorism.about.com/od/issuestrends/a/EconomicImpact.htm :

The US alone now spends about US $500 billion annually--20 percent of the US federal budget--on departments directly engaged in combating or preventing terrorism, most notably Defense and Homeland Security. The Defense budget increased by one-third, or over $100 billion, from 2001 to 2003 in response to the heightened sense of the threat of terrorism – an increase equivalent to 0.7 per cent of US GDP. Expenditures on defense and security are essential for any nation, but of course they also come with an opportunity cost; those resources are not available for other purposes, from spending on health and education to reductions in taxes. A higher risk of terrorism, and the need to combat it, simply raises that opportunity cost.

Estimated cost of NSA per year ~$4 Billion
Amount spent on cancer research by US goverment per year ~$5.6 Billion ( http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx )
Amount needed to end world hunger ~$30 Billion per year.
Amount needed for universal healthcare in the US ~$200 Billion ( http://truecostblog.com/2009/05/13/how-much-would-universal-healthcare-cost/ )

Losses to transmission are less than the losses to hideously inefficient ICEs in the vehicles. Even if you used a petroleum-burning power plant a couple states over for your electricity, you'd still come out ahead in charging up the electric car and using an electric motor in terms of efficiency. Car engines are just that bad.

A well-cited footnote for you... [1] Electrical energy is created by burning fossil fuels in a power plant at 40% efficiency, followed by transmitting it to your house at 93% efficiency, and using it in an electric vehicle at 92% efficiency, providing a total efficiency of around 34% for an electric vehicle. Crude oil refineries operate at 75% efficiency, and gasoline distribution might cause another 6% energy loss. Since internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient, total efficiency would be around 14%. Assuming that the natural gas and oil to power our vehicles comes from the same well, we can directly compare these efficiencies, and thus conclude that electric vehicles are significantly more efficient.

My dear chap, I've been following the peak oil story for years. I've read a few books on the topic. The things you are raising are those things you find out the first day that you hear about peak oil theory and start Googling.

The US passed it's peak oil production in 1970. Just as predicted.
http://truecostblog.com/2009/07/14/is-peak-oil-real-a-list-of-countries-past-peak/

Nothing will reverse that as all the easy oil has already been taken. Once upon a time they just has to drill a hole in Texas and oil would gush out. All the US oil now is hard. Deep sea, fracking, oil shale etc.

And most other oil producing nations have also passed their peak. For example my country, the UK with it's North Sea oil, passed it's peak in 1999.

You are of course aware of the huge oil projects started recently on private land in the US right?... The higher the price goes on oil... the more these projects are going to explode...

"The higher the price goes". There you are. You said it yourself, but didn't realise the implications. The price only goes up in real terms because the supply (production) has gone down. Extracting oil from these difficult sources are what happens on the way down the curve, after the peak.

This is all fully part of peak oil theory, it's not an argument against it.

Newt Gingrich can't talk his way out of peak oil. He probably doesn't even believe it. He just wants what every politician wants. Votes.

The oil industry generally don't admit to peak oil because they don't want governments and people to turn to alternatives, or be more frugal. The more demand for oil there is, the more profits they make.

The US military on the other hand has to live in the real world, where their ability to do their job relies on huge amounts of oil. And they have openly and a number of years accepted peak oil as a fact and shaped policy accordingly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/peak-oil-production-supply

The thing about the military is that they are pretty much immune to the lies of politicians and big industry. They have access to all the top level information themselves.

Still, I know from other economic topics we've been talking about here that facts don't really matter to you, so I don't expect to change your mind on this one either. But do yourself a favour: read up on this topic. And don't just google. Pick up an actual book or two. Don't just read for talking points for arguments, read for you. This topic, more then any other, is going to affect your life over the next few decades.

This is ignoring the whole "green" thing, because I strongly suspect that when total end-to-end footprint is considered, all-electrics will turn out, in practice, long term, to not be any more green than equivalent gasoline autos. But I'd sure enjoy driving one.

This is already demonstrably and known as incorrect. Even assuming the best for efficiency rates for an ICE and the worst for transmission losses and electric motor efficiency, when using the same raw source material, burning fossil fuels in a large-scale electric power plant and charging up an electric car is still an overall gain in efficiency. That it can also run on a variety of other sources of electric power is just a bonus at that point.

Information from a single well-cited source (http://truecostblog.com/2009/01/04/electric-vs-gasoline/):
"Electrical energy is created by burning fossil fuels in a power plant at 40% efficiency, followed by transmitting it to your house at 93% efficiency, and using it in an electric vehicle at 92% efficiency, providing a total efficiency of around 34% for an electric vehicle. Crude oil refineries operate at 75% efficiency, and gasoline distribution might cause another 6% energy loss. Since internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient, total efficiency would be around 14%. Assuming that the natural gas and oil to power our vehicles comes from the same well, we can directly compare these efficiencies, and thus conclude that electric vehicles are significantly more efficient."

If the fleet were converted, and the grid wasn't massively expanded, you would just end up with all the petrol being burned in power stations anyway, although with the state of the current fleet that might not be much of an efficiency loss.

From my understanding of the efficiency of a fixed-site oil-burning large-scale electric generator vs. a vehicles ICE, this would be a significant efficiency gain even if it were still burning petrol. From a foot note here:

Electrical energy is created by burning fossil fuels in a power plant at 40% efficiency, followed by transmitting it to your house at 93% efficiency, and using it in an electric vehicle at 92% efficiency, providing a total efficiency of around 34% for an electric vehicle. Crude oil refineries operate at 75% efficiency, and gasoline distribution might cause another 6% energy loss. Since internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient, total efficiency would be around 14%. Assuming that the natural gas and oil to power our vehicles comes from the same well, we can directly compare these efficiencies, and thus conclude that electric vehicles are significantly more efficient.

This is probably what I was thinking of on efficiency:
http://truecostblog.com/2009/01/04/electric-vs-gasoline/
"On a full life cycle basis including power plants and oil wells, electric vehicles manage about 34% efficiency versus only 14% for gasoline vehicles [1]"

OK, so you want to create a big industry (thorium power) over the next twenty years effectively from scratch, and then when solar panels are dirt cheap, we'll say? :-)

How can it be more trouble to add storage to the grid, including by molten salt, than to build thorium or whatever power plants?

Or perhaps we can have solar thermal mainly for night-time and PV mainly for day time?

Another related item on molten salt:
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/brightsource-energy-to-offer-solar-salt-storage-too/

You can look at the trends for yourself on things like PV. They are reaching grid parity. There is non conceivable reason why, once they do, there won't be tons more research on them to further drop their prices. People are talking about solar paints already, and there will be huge profit motives to make that work eventually as fossil fuels and mainstream nuclear go away for cost reasons.

You're right; you did list some storage options, but then you went on to say there was no viable option to fossil fuels and nuclear for baseline loads. Which is it? Here I've pointed to currently (or near currently) cost-effective PV and solar thermal, with a currently commercially viable energy storage solution for nighttime in use in a real location. Why is that mix not as viable as fossil fuels for handling the load for the grid? You said it takes a lot of land, but so does fossil fuel mining and roads and so on.

We could even make solar roadways if we wanted:
http://www.solarroadways.com/

That evnut page collects a bunch of different calculations and figures, and you are right they do not all agree.