The reason the methane at landfills and the natural gas at oil platforms is burnt off is that it is very difficult and expensive to capture, store and transport natural gas. One of the world's largest reserves of natural gas is in Alaska, but they pump it back into the ground (when drilling for oil) because there is no Natural Gas equivalent of the Alaskan pipeline.

This difficulty also makes it unsuitable for vehicles. You have to store it as a liquid in order to have enough BTU's in the tank for a reasonable range otherwise you would need to fuel up every day just to complete an ordinary commute. The infrastructure change that would need to take place is mindboggling.

Electricity is the natural choice for an alternative fuel. The distribution system is already in place- has been for the better part of this century- we just need better batteries!

I imagine a giant pile of lead acid batteries. Batteries present their own waste disposal problems. The average car battery lasts between 2 to 5 years. If we had say the equivilent of 10-20 batteries that would make processing the waste a major issue.

It is rather inconvenient to wait 3-12 hours while your car charges. Then there is the age old problem of where are you going to plug it in and who pays for the electricity. I have toyed with the idea of an electric car but it is not very cost effective. It generally will make cars heavier and cause even more roadwork to be required. You still have to produce heat to run a defroster and keep passengers warm and provide power for all the safety equipment like headlights and breaklights and brakes and air conditioning, and computer controlled systems. I think this is why Americal has all but given up on electric cars. The Cost of batteries is one of the primary costs of solar power being prohibitive as a viable power source.

In the USA many people tend to be further spread out and travel seems to be more of an issue than is some smaller countries. I sometimes think east coast and west coast people are from a different planet. It is really hard to compare say Germany or France to the USA. I lived in South Korea for a while and you could get from one end of the main Peninsula to the other end quite easily in a day. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. It is an advantage in the sense that we have more natural resuorces and fewer border problems and everyone normally speaks the same language. However, it is a disadvantage when you think of controlling 50 different states, 48 of which make up the continental United States. It can be rather difficult to get 12 people to agree on a verdict in a legal court trial, and even harder to get 50 people to agree on anything.