来源：《华尔街日报》
原文见刊日期：2022年6月14日
Progressives first demanded that social media platforms silence critics of climate alarmism. Now White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy wants them to censor content on the costs of a force-fed green energy transition.
进步人士首先要求社交媒体平台让气候危言耸听的批评者噤声。现在，白宫国家气候顾问吉娜·麦卡锡希望平台审查涉及强制绿色能源转型成本的内容。
A few years ago, Facebook enlisted third-party “fact checkers” to review news stories about climate. That didn’t satisfy Democratic Senators who howled about a “loophole” for opinion pieces. Facebook then began appending fact-checks to op-eds that criticized apocalyptic climate models and studies. The goal was to restrict readership.
几年前，Facebook邀请第三方“事实核查员”来审查有关气候的新闻报道。这并没有让民主党参议员满意，他们大声疾呼，认为评论文章是“漏网之鱼”。随后，Facebook开始在批评末世气候模型和研究的专栏文章中添加事实核查。目的是限制读者群。
Now progressives are moving to censorship phase two, which is shutting down debate over climate “solutions.” “Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” Ms. McCarthy said in an Axios interview. “What the industry is now doing is seeding doubt about the costs associated with green energy and whether they work or not.”
现在，进步人士正转向审查制度的第二阶段，即关闭有关气候“解决方案”的辩论。“现在，审查的重点并不是否认气候变化问题，”麦卡锡在接受Axios采访时说。“能源行业目前正在做的是，让人们对绿色能源的相关成本以及它们是否有效产生怀疑。”
Ms. McCarthy cited the week-long power outage in Texas in February 2021. “The first thing we read in the paper was” that the blackouts occurred “because of those wind turbines,” she said. In fact, most of the media immediately blamed climate change and fossil fuels.
麦卡锡提到了2021年2月德克萨斯州长达一周的停电。她说：“我们在报纸上读到的第一件事是，停电发生是因为那些风力涡轮机”。事实上，大多数媒体立即将停电归咎于气候变化和化石燃料。
Wind energy plunged as temperatures dropped and turbines froze. Gas-fired plants couldn’t make up for the wind shortfall despite running all-out, and then some went down too. Ms. McCarthy doesn’t want to admit the inconvenient truth that renewable energy sources are making the grid increasingly unreliable.
随着气温下降和涡轮机冻结，风能大幅下降。尽管燃气发电厂全力运转，但仍无法弥补风力不足的问题，有些发电厂也出现了故障。麦卡锡女士不想承认可再生能源使电网越来越不可靠这一令人为难的事实。
Comparing fossil-fuel companies to Big Tobacco, she complained that “dark money” is being used to “fool” the public about “the benefits of clean energy.” “We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she said, because highlighting the costs of green energy is “equally dangerous to denial because we have to move fast.” Got that, Mark Zuckerberg?
她将化石燃料公司与大型烟草公司相比较，抱怨“黑钱”被用来在“清洁能源的好处”上“欺骗”公众。“我们需要科技公司真正投入进来，”她说，因为强调绿色能源的成本“与否认气候变化同样危险，因为我们必须迅速行动”。明白了吗，马克·扎克伯格？
Merely pointing out technical limitations of lithium-ion batteries could be “disinformation.” Asked whether climate disinformation posed a threat to public health, Ms. McCarthy replied “absolutely.”
仅仅指出锂离子电池的技术限制可能就是“虚假信息”。当被问及气候虚假信息是否会对公众健康构成威胁时，麦卡锡回答说“绝对会”。
Some conservative scholars argue that Big Tech companies could be sued as “state actors” for violating users’ First Amendment speech rights when they censor content at the command of government officials. Ms. McCarthy is helping make their case.
一些保守派学者认为，大型科技公司可能会被起诉为“国家行为体”，因为它们在政府官员的命令下审查内容，侵犯了用户在《第一修正案》下的言论权利。麦卡锡女士正在帮助它们进行辩护。