The Hartwell Paper has not been universally welcomed. An academic colleague who is a Greenpeace adviser (although not identified as such in the article) was quoted prominently in some BBC coverage darkly criticising the fact that we received some of our funding for the exercise from Japanese industry. Indeed we did. And one of the co-authors is the climate policy expert for the Japanese steel industry whose world-leading data we employed in the paper. We also received support from a prominent left-wing American charitable foundation, by the way, which wasn't mentioned. I am tired of this lazy innuendo and as a group we rebut it directly. I would suggest that any policy analysis of this sort which does not engage directly with industry is thereby diminished. Industry was not present at the making of the Kyoto methodology and that is maybe one reason why it was flawed from birth. It was not party to the concept and, despite gallons of greenwash, has been mostly in reactive, tax-avoidance mode when not looking for dodgy profits to be made from creative emissions-trading scams. This is neither productive nor necessary.

We have never met, but I first encountered you 25 years ago as author with Harold Lever of a short and astringent Penguin book called Debt and Danger, on an earlier financial crisis. I used it when supervising undergraduates in Cambridge and can tell you that they too appreciated its clarity. So I know that you can recognise a crisis when you meet one, and can analyse it quickly and creatively. Sudden circumstance has dropped you into a corker of a crisis now. But as the Hartwellites write, this is a good crisis not to waste. One for all and all for one! We are more numerous than the Musketeers, and the Hartwellites stand ready at your service.