Abstract:We thank the authors of the three letters (Hertwich 2014; Brandao et al. 2014; Dale and Kim 2014) for taking time to respond to our article (Plevin et al. 2014). Although the letters raised numerous interesting issues worthy of discussion, we found that many of the critical comments addressed issues outside the scope of our article. Rather than exhausting our limited space arguing against what we did not write, we focus here on issues discussed in the article. We leave it as an exercise for the reader (and perhaps the letter writers) to compare the original article to the claims made in the letters.