To your point about vast empty spaces: Canada (and to an extent, the USA) has a lot of that too, and we are NOWHERE when it comes to high speed rail. Like, okay, we don't want to convert our oil-pilled cities to walkable, public transit and bicycle havens like Europe. Overturning city design is hard (not impossible, obviously, but it takes a lot of political will that we clearly don't have), but we've got scads of empty space to put in high speed rail between big cities that would be great for the economy, convenience and the environment. And we don't do it. Because we're terrible at anything that mildly inconveniences oil interests.
I think points 2, 3 and 4 are kind of irrelevant, to be honest. People here need jobs, we have a large construction industry (which is mostly wrapped up in the real estate industry, but only the kind that builds homes for people that already have a lot of money, not the homes that we need) and again, there's plenty of empty space. And even if there weren't a lot of vast empty distances to cross, governments in North America have plenty of power to appropriate property for this sort of thing. They do it all the time.
But anyway, I think a lot of the point of the post you're responding to is that China upholds its obligations, takes global warming fairly seriously, and we really can't allow people (mostly western conservative politicians) to blame all our woes on them.