EPA

Donald Trump is currently considering several candidates with close ties to the fossil fuel industry for the role of US Secretary of Energy. While that’s far from being progressive since renewables are widely considered to be the future of energy, it makes some sense from a conservative point of view since fossil fuels are currently the main source of energy in the US.

It is a whole lot more difficult to justify the nomination of someone with close ties the fossil fuel industry to the head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Yet in an obvious ‘fox guarding the henhouse’ metaphor, that’s exactly what Donald Trump did yesterday. Several news outlets are reporting that Trump finally chose Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to lead the agency. 
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Update: Elon Musk said in a tweet today that the American Enterprise Institute meeting was not secretive and that he was not there to talk about Trump.

The AEI meeting wasn't secret and I was only there for a few hours to talk about Mars and sustainable energy. Nothing to do with Trump.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2016

According to a report from the Huffington Post, Elon Musk was among a handful of tech CEOs and Republican establishment members who recently met at the American Enterprise Institute’s World Forum to discuss how to best stop Donald Trump.

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Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and 38 company and environmental group leaders signed a letter proposing that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) lets VW off the hook in California for having cheated on reporting emissions in its diesel cars and in return, VW would be forced to significantly invest in electric vehicles or other zero-emission vehicles manufacturing in the state.

According to German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (via Reuters), the EPA, potentially inspired by the proposal, asked Volkswagen to manufacture electric vehicles at its Tennessee plant as part of the current negotiation over the fix of the more than 500,000 diesel vehicles in violation of pollution limits in the US.
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