Each spring, we take heed of the planet we call home and assess where we stand as a society when it comes to safe-keeping our environs, by celebrating Earth Day. This year Earth Day is March 20, leading Iowa to take heed of the lands that we oversee on a daily basis.
The holiday officially began in 1970 as a way to celebrate Earth at large and engage citizens from countries spanning the globe to do more to safeguard our collective home, beginning in San Francisco and growing from sea to shining sea ever since.
IowaBets.com paused our Iowa sports betting coverage and used data from Google Trends between Feb. 29 – March 7 to see which states were searching for “Earth Day,” and “Sustainability.”
Then, we used information from SolarPower.Guide to determine what the solar installations per capita is in the states found searching the above Google Trends criteria. We then created a system based on the average search interest scores and the solar installations per capita to create an overall ranking of the most sustainable states.
Overall, the Hawkeye State is ranked in a tie with Texas as the fifth most sustainable state in America, with a collective search interest score of 66 and 185.74 solar installations per capita, ranking behind Hawaii, Rhode Island, New Mexico and Wisconsin nationally.
Iowa ranked ahead of neighboring Kansas, which had a search interest score of 64 with 31.95 solar installations per capita, while Pennsylvania (62 score and 265.10 solar installations per capita), Indiana (62 score and 57.84 solar installations per capita) and Mississippi (62 score and 27.47 solar installations per capita) rounded out the top 10 nationally.
This Earth Day, it seems like the message of global sustainability has rung through the ranks of the Hawkeye State, with Iowans taking the siren song of our home planet to heart and seeking out ways to lessen their collective carbon footprint on the lands that we live on.
In addition to providing sports betting information and analysis, IowaBets.com also does stories of general interest, such as: America’s Most Pizza-Loving States.
Author
Christopher Boan is a lead writer at IowaBets.com specializing in covering state issues. He has covered sports and sports betting in Arizona for more than seven years, including stops at ArizonaSports.com, the Tucson Weekly and the Green Valley News.
