Weekly News Roundup for February 3, 2017

These are some of the stories we’ve been following this week.

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  The Giant Mine in Northwest Territories, Canada. By Trevor MacInnis. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

  Republicans are considering eliminating a law that requires oil and gas companies to capture methane released during operations on public lands.

• Residents in Waco, Texas filed a lawsuit against the city over plans to build a new landfill.

• A $1 billion lawsuit alleges that an old landfill contaminated nearby property in New York.

• In South Dakota, a man charged in connection with an EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program case pleaded guilty to a felony.

• Officials discovered that blood tests on residents in southern New Hampshire revealed the residents had twice the national average of PFCs in their bloodstream. The high levels are attributed to nearby contaminated groundwater.

• Companies can now bid on cleaning up the Giant Mine in Yellow Knife in the Northwest Territories. The total cost of remediation could reach $600 million.

• Home values in Fayetteville, North Carolina are down an average of 7.2 percent.

• Although the Keystone XL Pipeline has been approved in the U.S., environmentalists in Canada want to see the project reviewed again in hopes of stopping it from being built.

• Oil trains are getting less use lately, and with more pipelines being constructed, they could see even a bigger drop in utilization.