Poor Mitt Romney. He keeps trying to prop up his bad policy proposals with gimmicky political props that flop.

He recently unveiled his energy policy, for example, in Hobbs, N.M., rather than in ExxonMobil's boardroom, which is the only place his oil-soaked proposal would actually receive genuine, full-throated huzzahs. But a group of hip-hip-hooraying fat-cats in suits is not quite the down-home, regular-guy image that Mr. Multimillionaire is presently trying to project to voters. Thus, like a flimflam man pitching snake oil, Romney set up an outdoor stage in front of an oil rig in Hobbs, and a local industry chieftain assembled an audience of workers in hard hats to be his regular-guy props.

To add to the hype, he had a chart with a bar graph onstage with him, supposedly to give a smear of credibility to his wondrous claims. However, the chart was too small for the audience to see, plus the wind kept threatening to blow it off the stage. No problem, though — Romney just faked it.

"On the left hand side," he flimmed and flammed, "you see a bar there that represents, you can't read the writing, it's too far back, but I can read it ... so I'm going to tell you what it says." Then he concluded with: "As you can see" — even though people could not see it. It was perfect PR puffery.

Only, it didn't work. As he pitched a policy that literally had been written by Big Oil drillers, frackers and pipeliners, his audience of hard hats looked on in bafflement. It was as though they were watching a rich financier and buddy of the bosses trying to sell them a pig in a poke — which is exactly what they were selling.

Romney failed to mention it during his show-and-tell flimflam routine, but on his way to Hobbs, he stopped in Texas, where he picked up a ...

Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller's formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses.

But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping drilling waste onto the region's land and into its waterways with increasing regularity.

Hydraulic fracturing — the controversial process behind the spread of natural gas drilling — is enabling oil companies to reach previously inaccessible reserves in North Dakota, triggering a turnaround not only in the state's fortunes, but also in domestic energy production. North Dakota now ranks second behind only Texas in oil output nationwide.

The downside is waste — lots of it. Companies produce millions of gallons of salty, chemical-infused wastewater, known as brine, as part of drilling and fracking each well. Drillers are supposed to inject this material thousands of feet underground into disposal wells, but some of it isn't making it that far.

According to data obtained by ProPublica, oil companies in North Dakota reported more than 1,000 accidental releases of oil, drilling wastewater or other fluids in 2011, about as many as in the previous two years combined. Many more illicit releases went unreported, state regulators acknowledge, when companies dumped truckloads of toxic fluid along the road or drained waste pits illegally.

State officials say most of the releases are small. But in several cases, spills turned out to be far larger than initially thought, totaling millions of gallons. Releases of brine, which is often laced with carcinogenic chemicals and heavy metals, have wiped out aquatic life in streams and wetlands and sterilized farmland. The effects on land can last for years, or even decades.

Compounding such problems, ...