what is the most environmentally friendly state?

Answer 1

Hmmm... Gas?

no.. wait! Liquid!... yes... liquid.. every plant needs water.

Answer 2

Hmmm, probably one with few refineries and few people to pollute and leave crap around. Since most of Alaska is wilderness.. I say Alaska. ;-)

Really... we can only guess, and since we don't have a good metric, its not worth answering.. Even if we went to serious lengths to evaluate this question, we still have the problem of the inter-dependencies between states. A state might be very "environmentally friendly" but if the populace has to import products from un-environmentally states, what is the net effect?

You'd be better off answering who's the best baseball player. At least you'd have some ballpark figure who's at least in the neighborhood of being "best".

But if you truly were tasked with this... lets face it, since the answer is going to be largely BS anyway, come up with the following figures

1. refineries
2. factories. Unfortunately some factories are worse than others. That ought to be accounted for, but probably cannot. Also, define what a factory is.
3. automobiles, public transportation... (I.E, maybe an estimate of people per vehicle, or maybe even better, average energy used per person for vehicular travel).
4. waste disposal (what about recycling plants? Note that this is interesting, in that even though recycling may save paper, etc, they pay pollute local area as much as or worse than any other factory).
5. Ideally, import and export of goods, which would contribute to the net affect. but you're not going to be able to figure that out.
6. energy used per person for electricity and heat (actually relatively easy, except for places where many people have their own generators, but that may be ignorable).
7. Farmland runoff. Water pollution.
8. Garbage generation. You could argue Total amount of garbage, but that disregards those states that export more garbage than they import. But there may be some value in arguing that states accepting garbage should perform worse.

Make sure you make the definitions of what constitutes what and what exactly you are measuring, before you conduct the search, lest you be accused of bias, or altering the results to best fit your view. If you change your definitions midway, explain at length why you changed them.

Answer 3

State as in a United States state or nation state?

Answer 4

California

Answer 5

Florida

Answer 6

If you're asking about one of the 50 U.S. states, my guess would be Oregon.