Australia’s proposed carbon tax could raise sovereign risk, ruin coal industry – miners

Mining giants warned Australia on Wednesday that its planned carbon-reduction scheme could cost the industry as much as $25 billion through 2020, cut coal production by a third and send investment in that sector tumbling 13 percent.

“Australia is walking the plank,” Seamus French, who runs the coal division of miner Anglo-American Plc , told a conference, a day after the Australian government’s climate-change adviser suggested how carbon emissions should be taxed.