Coal industry could leave U.S. taxpayers with major bill -Jewell

U.S. taxpayers could be left with multibillion-dollar liabilities if large coal companies are pushed to bankruptcy, the Interior Department Secretary said on Wednesday. --At issue is a practice known as self-bonding, allowed under a decades-old mining program, in which some of the country's biggest coal companies forego insurance on a portion of future mine cleanup costs.

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(Hat tip: KimR)