Hands up, I must admit that I hadn't been following the twitterings of Joe Barton, the 59-year-old Republican congressman for the sixth district of Texas. But it appears, judging by his latest offering, that we might have a new star rising among the Twiteratti.

"I seemed [sic] to have baffled the Energy Sec with basic question - Where does oil come from?" he hurriedly typed out on his TwitterBerry last night (or maybe it was one of his staff?). Barton was referring to his role as the highest-ranking Republican on the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the fact that he put the final question to Steven Chu, the new US secretary of energy, during his appearance before the committee yesterday.

"Smokey" Joe Barton – who some bloggers have been keen to point out has been the recipient of $1,330,160 in "oil money" during his career – is evidently very pleased with himself as he believes that his killer question "baffled" the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and former professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at Berkeley. Judge for yourself by watching the video above. Here's the transcript of the exchange:

Barton: Dr Chu, I don't want to leave you out. 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, it's a combination of where the sources of the oil and gas…

Barton: Isn'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've created from Texas and shipped it up there and put it under ground so we can now pump it up?

Chu: No, there are continental plates that have been drifting around throughout the geological ages.

Barton: So it just drifted up there.

Chu: Uh…That's certainly what happened. It's a result of things like that.

Chairman: The gentleman's time has expired.

What a shame Chu didn't have longer to tackle the important question of whether there might indeed be a big pipeline carrying "dinosaur juice", as some Texas oilmen like to refer to the black stuff, from the Lone Star state up to the Arctic circle. It's a shame, too, that Barton didn't have the time to quiz Chu on the veracity, or otherwise, of climate change and its anthropogenic causes. After all, this is what Barton said just a couple of weeks ago before the very same committee:

I believe that Earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons. And I think mankind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth. When it rains we find shelter. When it's hot, we get shade. When it's cold, we find a warm place to stay. Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is.

As well as this, a few weeks earlier, on the matter of increasing the use of wind turbines:

Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it's hotter to areas where it's cooler. That's what wind is. Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen, Mr Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can't transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It's just something to think about.

Barton, of course, is a well-known climate change sceptic who recently called our very own Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to the committee as an "expert witness" on climate change, and who led the witch-hunt against Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes and their now-famous "hockey stick graph", which has become such an emblematic flashpoint in the Climate Wars that rage here online and beyond.

Personally, I say give this man a show. Barton, somewhat modestly, has already set up his own YouTube channel, but I think this man's views need to reach a wider audience. After all, sunlight is the best disinfectant.