Sadly, I've come to much the same conclusion. The most vocal of the environmentalists are demanding that we all conserve water here in California, claiming that we have a water shortage, when there's approximately a trillion gallons of water within a quarter mile of our coastline, just waiting to be used.
So instead of spending a few more pennies per gallon to set up the mass-desalinization that we simply must have to properly sustain the population over the long term, these folks keep insisting that we should try to conserve our way out by doing stupid things like saving the wasted water while you wait for your shower to get hot and using it to water your plants, and other token gestures that significantly reduce quality of life while not making a significant dent in the state's water consumption (the overwhelming majority of which is used not by showers and toilets, not even by lawns, but by mass agriculture).
The problem is, when these folks say that they want to save 25% of California's water use through cuts to residential and municipal water use, they're really saying that they want every man, woman, and child to magically import about twice as much water as they currently use from some magical river in the sky so that they can be net producers of water instead of consumers, at about their current rate of consumption. Yeah, that's going to work.
And then they propose dubious ideas like reprocessing of waste water as a means of saving water... except that reusing water doesn't save water. Waste water typically gets processed and dumped into rivers and streams. If instead of doing that, you reuse the water, you're taking out less water, but you're also failing to put back exactly the same amount of water as you reuse. Yes, that might mean less processing for the cities downstream, but in the end, you still have the same amount of water in the river that you did before, so there's the same quantity of water for folks downstream as before.
The only way that reusing water could actually save water would be if the total human consumption and release of water exceeded the amount of water needed to keep the rivers and streams at a safe minimum level for wildlife, allowing less water to be released from the reservoirs upstream. Unfortunately, that is not the case, so waste reprocessing cannot (safely) save water.
These are presumably the same people who, when we had a power shortage, didn't demand more generator capacity, didn't demand investigations into the illegal practices that resulted in the shortage, but instead tried to get everybody to save power by banning incandescent light bulbs. This, of course, had no noticeable effect on our state's power consumption because the total consumption from incandescent bulbs averaged a fraction of a percent of the state's power use (because nearly 100% of businesses switched to primarily fluorescent lighting at least twenty years ago). So they took away a form of lighting product that a lot of us preferred under the guise of saving power, but didn't actually save a meaningful amount of power.
You get the idea. Sane environmentalism means pushing for renewable energy sources. Trying to get people to reduce consumption is like screaming at the wind, demanding that it not mess up your hair; anybody going down that path is pretty much guaranteed to look absolutely insane.