You're not paying for the external cost of generating the electricity, which is the problem. Those external costs include mercury and CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants. I suppose if those costs were tacked on to your power bill you'd have a case.

That's not correct. Parts of the US - especially in the north-east - are very much like Europe, and both heavy rail and light rail are viable in those areas. That's also where the bulk of the population lives.

You live in a very big and diverse country. Just because something won't work in rural Arizona or Nebraska doesn't mean it won't work anywhere else.

This was outlawed here in Australia a few years ago, so merchants are now free to charge a fee for credit card purchases (which some would call offering a discount for cash).

The main reason for doing this was to make the costs of buying by credit card transparent. Under the old system, credit card providers charged a fee to the merchant, but the fee was hidden from the consumer. The merchants had to absorb this cost by raising prices slightly across the board. That meant that the banks were effectively applying a small sales tax to nearly all retail sales. Estimates varied, but it was generally thought to be around 1% to 2%. It doesn't sound like much, but across every sale in the country, it's a huge amount.

Most big retailers continue to do this, but smaller retailers either have a mimimum amount for credit card purchases, or tack on a fee of around 3%.