Think on this as a completely fictitious example of analysis, none of this is fact, but is an example:
Research has shown that most swimming pools loose say 100 litres of water a day through leakage, and let’s assume there are 5000 pools in the country, then a paper could be presented stating that the water losses involved with swimming pools amount to 100X5000X365 litres a year = 182500 thousand litres a year, these are impressive numbers and could make headline news, at least in a local paper, after all 182 million litres lost in leaks is an impressive number.
However now let’s look at the bigger picture, it would be reasonable to believe that anyone getting out of the pool might carry with them say 2 litres of water, and lets say 500 people visited the pool every day, then our natural losses could be 2X500X5000X365 litres a year = 1825000000 litres a year, over 1.8 billion - a very impressive number of which we can do nothing about.
Then a real knowledgeable person might look at the problem and say, ‘you’ve missed a major point’ and that is evaporation accounts for some 500 litres a day’ and that would amount to 500X5000X365 =912500000 litres a year - now that is a another really impressive number 0.9 billion litres a year - and we can do nothing about it at all. Hence we have some 0.9125+1.825 = 2.7375 billion Litres of waste of which we have no control. (compared with our 0.1825 billion of leaks = 6.25%)
So now we are seeing the real picture and maybe these figures put the original leak into some perspective as being not really that important.
Personally I believe that this is the view we are not taking on CO2 emissions, from what I read they account for only some 20% of all greenhouse gasses and Methane is considerably more damaging therefore if we reduced CO2 to zero it would hardly make a big difference but would reduce our economy to stone age technology and that would not be possible, nor acceptable, nor desirable to anyone.