This is the sort of thing educated and informed people are up against in this country.  The only thing Mr. Chu was probably stumped by was the ignorance of a member of the House of Representatives.

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 things like that.

The worst part of this is that no one really knows what point Rep. Barton was trying to make.  Ask any fifth grader how this stuff works and they’ll understand it better than Rep. Barton.  For someone with a BA in engineering, a former consultant for ARCO Petroleum, the Former Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, helped author the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and is currently the House Republicans’ leader on energy, he certainly is clueless.