Cooling Toronto Using Lake Ontario

An anonymous reader writes "Air cooled by the frigid waters deep in Lake Ontario started bringing relief to buildings in downtown Toronto on Tuesday after the valves were symbolically opened on the multi-million-dollar project. The company says that they have the capacity to air condition 100 office buildings or 8,000 homes - the equivalent of 32 million square feet of building space. They note that the cooling system reduces energy usage, freeing up megawatts from the Ontario's electrical grid, minimizes ozone-depleting refrigerants and reduces the amount of carbon dioxide entering the air."

Comments

"Symbolically opened"?

[sczimme]

Air cooled by the frigid waters deep in Lake Ontario started bringing relief to buildings in downtown Toronto on Tuesday after the valves were symbolically opened on the multi-million-dollar project.

How does one "symbolically open" a valve? When one is finished, is the valve really open or only "symbolically" open?

As an aside, the summary by 'an anonymous reader' is completely lifted verbatim from the article itself.

Re:Environmental effects

[rho]

Ooh, cool! If you can ignore an environmental impact because the environment that is impacted is so large and resilient, we can put to rest the bogus science that is "global warming". Do you know how big the fucking Earth is? It's huge. We can pump car exhaust and cow farts until the, ahh, cows come home and not make much of a dent. Because the Earth, she is huge. When you take into account the real benefits of an industrial society--computers that remember for us, cool cars to pick up chicks, microwavable pizza that doesn't taste like a gym sock, and babies that don't die of diarrhea in a God-forsaken hellhole in damned-to-hell Absurdistan--the environmental impact gets lost in the noise.

About time this was acknowledged!