These are the days of the COP15 summit and more or less everyone is busy stating their views of a better world. There are a lot of professional opinion makers in the fray. Prominent among them, Naomi Klein yesterday contributed with the following commentary in her Memo to Danes: Even You Cannot Control This Summit: “In the morning demonstrators are going to march to the Bella Center to demand real solutions to the climate crisis, not the fuzzy math and carbon trading on offer inside.”

Carbon trading might be a legitimate means for handling the current problems, it might be the contrary, but to simply oppose “real solutions” to “fuzzy math and carbon trading” is downright silly. Why is math an unreal tool to the task? One should think that mathematics would be a necessary and very real element in fighting climate change. What she means, of course, is that the official negotiators have trouble agreeing on the math and that carbon trading is an unacceptable solution. But sadly, the math seems equally fuzzy at Klimaforum09, and carbon trading is, supposedly, a manifestly more real solution than “real solutions.”

Of course, there should be a popular appeal for a strict and binding resolution. But when Naomi Klein uses her Naomi Klein authority to back the appeal she should be a bit more careful not to weaken it by random ranting. Apparently, when marveling at Danish design and wondering where the Danish talent for such products comes from, she was told the following: “We’re control freaks.” “It comes from being a small country with not much power. We have to control what we can.” Naomi Klein then uses this dubious rendering of Danish character, if such a thing ever existed, to conclude in a final bravado: “So memo to our Danish hosts: sure, Copenhagen is your city, and we love you for your bicycles and windmills. But it’s everyone’s planet. Stop trying to design us out of the picture.”

She seems to be using a rather confused terminology. The title is directed at Danes. In the finale she addresses the Danish hosts. The organizers or the Danish population? Copenhagen is who’s city? The bicycles and windmills belong to whom? What is “it’s everyone’s planet” if not an empty phrase, “everyone” being the most fuzzy mathematical description of quantity ever? And when she wants not to be “designed out of the picture,” is she asking the organizers, the population of Denmark, the police, or who?

The acts of the police during saturday’s demonstration are a disgrace, and so are the laws that allow them. But ascribing “fuzzy” identities to Danes or the owners of the planet or whoever she feels are responsible for restrictions of the rights to protest and the doubtful outcome of the summit demonstrate that the angry call for “real solutions” is but words, words, words. And not the poetry as is needed, which signifies its own lack of signification, but the endless words of indignation that strut and fret their hour upon the stage.

Blanchot once wrote: “Je ne puis dire quel malheur envahit l’homme qui une fois a pris la parole.” A possible translation would be “I cannot express the calamity that falls upon a man once he starts to speak.” Speaking is a wondrous and terrible thing. To speak out for or against something as an authoritative individual will easily undermine the goals you hope to achieve and serve nothing but the constitution of your own self image. Maybe it is time to adopt the motto of a certain unnamable character: “De nobis ipsis silemus.”