[kolanos]

> Solely relying on these statewide volumes is controversial because they don't consider the fact that most of the volume of water used for environmental purposes includes flows down Wild and Scenic Rivers in the North Coast where there is no practical way to recover it for either agricultural or urban use because it lacks many connections to the statewide water supply system. It also doesn't factor in the amount of water required to keep salty water from the Pacific Ocean from intruding into the Delta beyond a certain small concentration.

These are solvable problems, so excluding that water from the ~40 million acre feet of water California uses every year seems like a convenient way to balloon the other uses. Plus as cited earlier, of the 39% of water use attributed to agriculture, 28% of it actually has multiple uses in addition to agriculture and is recycled (the 11% figure). So only 28% of the total is actually exclusively used for agriculture.