Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) seems to think that he stumped Nobel-prize winning physicist and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. He tweets:
I seemed to have baffled the Energy Sec with basic question - Where does oil come from?
Well, here's the video.
For the technologically challenged:
Barton: You’re our scientist. I have one simple question for you in the last six seconds. How did all the oil and gas get to Alaska and under the Arctic Ocean?
Chu: (laughs) This is a complicated story, but oil and gas is the result of hundreds of millions of years of geology, and in that time also the plates have moved around, and so, um, it’s the combination of where the sources of the oil and gas are–
Barton: But, but wouldn’t it obvious that at one time it was a lot warmer in Alaska and on the North Pole. It wasn’t a big pipeline that we created in Texas and shipped it up there and then put it under ground so that we can now pump it out and ship it back.
Chu: No. There are–there’s continental plates that have been drifting around throughout the geological ages–
Barton: So it just drifted up there?
Chu: That’s certainly what happened. And so it’s a result of thinks like that.
Maybe Chu was baffled, because that was one of the dumbest questions I've ever seen asked at a committee hearing, and that's saying something.
I don't think I'm taking any risks when I say that Secretary Chu, who only recently left his position at my current location (UC Berkeley) to become Secretary of Energy, knows more about geological processes than Rep. Barton. I think the headline of TPM's coverage of this event summarizes it well: What Thinking Folks Are Up Against