“My mom said that the government made up climate change for money,” my first-grade best friend Molly remarked to me, standing in front of her living room TV, staring unknowingly at Fox News. “God would never really let something like that happen.” She was confident in her words. I, however, was not. While lucky enough that my parents relied on news outlets other than Fox, I didn’t have the luxury of a religious upbringing, so I was unable to wield conservative media’s blind faith shield against anxieties of the world ending in a big ball of fire — that’s what I thought global warming was as a child, that one day everything would get too hot and simply combust, flames engulfing me and everything I loved. Once I was dead, I would spend an eternity surrounded by even more fire. Molly also taught me that. She recommended I start sleeping over every Saturday so I could easily accompany her to church every Sunday… ‘or else.’ She was a really kind friend to be so worried about my damnation.
Once I knew I was going to hell, or actually, honestly stopped believing in it altogether, I wasn’t too concerned about avoiding other sins that would punch my ticket down. My parents tried their best, but without religion as a fear factor, there was no way I wasn’t going to hit a box-mod vape the first time someone offered it to my angsty 14-year-old self (getting grounded didn’t seem as threatening as a lifetime underground.) My mom had made me promise never to smoke a cigarette, citing her own horror story that one hit made her throw up on the spot. While her story was convincing enough, a vape was not a cigarette. It was a much healthier alternative! So, I figured, why not? This was only the start of five long years of nicotine addiction, countless money spent fueling it, and my estimate of at least a body’s weight equivalent of toxic waste dumped into me and the environment.
In the beginning, it wasn’t even the nicotine I was after, as much as the social currency attached to knowing and sharing the information of which ‘shady Shell’ station wouldn’t ID you. Throughout my time in high school, I kept up as box-mod vapes fell out of popularity, buying a JUUL from my boyfriend’s older brother as soon as I got addicted to his. JUULs were much easier to sneak into the school bathroom, and there was no need to refill them with juice. You could just buy more tiny plastic pods! I probably bought and threw away at least 15 JUULs in my time. Each one went with the intention of quitting, which lasted only a few days before I went and bought a new one.
This cycle spun until disposable vapes gained popularity in my junior year. They were even more effortless. You didn’t have to worry about buying more pods; just buy a whole new vape! They were (are) so popular that I never even had to have my own. I would just chief off any given one of my peers in literally any given social situation to get my nic fix. The term coined for this behavior was ‘fiending’ off friends, the root word fiend’s archaic definition literally meaning ‘the devil.’ Sorry, Molly.
Vaping among teenagers is an epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, vape use among kids in the United States increased by 1.5 million between 2017 and 2018 (my junior year of high school). The popularity among my contemporaries can be commonly chalked up to vape companies’ claims that they are not as bad for you as cigarettes are (despite delivering the same addictive substance). This non-threatening reputation, accompanied by the GenZ-friendly bright-colored packaging and flavors such as ‘banana split’ and ‘Kool-Aid,’ fueled the disease to spread like wildfire. Despite this friendly marketing, the proof of vaping’s goodness is not in the pudding (another vape flavor); studies have recently found vaping is just as bad, if not worse for you than cigarettes. For example, BMJ’s “Tobacco Control,” a peer-reviewed journal, revealed that e-cigarettes produce high levels of formaldehyde, the cancer-causing chemical also found in traditional cigarettes.
Studies showing the uptick in youth nicotine addiction prompted government action. In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned fruit and mint-flavored vape flavors, leaving us to gag on Virginia Tobacco and menthol. Then in 2019, the FDA also raised the legal age to buy tobacco products from 18 to 21. I had just turned 18 when my newfound freedom to be addicted to nicotine was revoked. Regardless of these efforts, it was far too late to stop us fiending teens — we were already addicted. Plus, flavored disposable vapes existed as yummy substitutes for the banned JUUL pod flavors. These vapes contained synthetic nicotine, which is different from nicotine extracted from tobacco because it’s made in a lab (Washington Post). The FDA ban only regulated nicotine: regular old natural nicotine, so all vape companies had to do was switch the type of nicotine they used to continue to sell it—air quotes—only to people over 21.
In my senior year, I was driving home from a friend’s house, so unfortunately hungover that one rip of my Tobacco flavored JUUL (yes, I still used a JUUL. It is a timeless device and the flavors never mattered to me much anyway, just the nicotine buzz) caused me to yak a little in my mouth (my mom did warm me, after all). I immediately chucked the small device out the window of my car, cursing the entire state of Virginia and swearing this was the last time I would ever hit a vape. Then, the vaping hit me. That was a BATTERY I just threw out my window. I whipped a U-turn, pulled over, and hopped out of my car to frantically search for the silver nic stick. When I found it, I, of course, hit it again while I started to cry. Thinking about how many of these I alone had gone through in my life, sinking deeper into my despair, imagining every kid I knew at a party with disposable vapes in their hands. I had spent my teenage years in existential dread about climate change, simultaneously addicted to little litter sticks full of poison liquid.
The same rebellious act I picked up to cope with God heating up our earth at an exponential pace happened to contribute to the heating. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests that 168 million disposable vapes are sold annually in the United Kingdom (UK) alone. Disposable vapes are exactly what they sound like, vapes that are meant to be thrown away as soon as the battery runs out despite their rechargeable nature. One of the leading issues with this mass production of waste, aside from the mass production of waste itself, is that in each of those vapes there is about 0.15g of lithium — a metal known in our energy crisis as white gold. Less than a quarter of a gram is a seemingly small amount, but on the scale that they are thrown away at, 10 tons of lithium end up in landfills annually (TBIJ). In the UK alone. Remember here, the American population is nearly five times that of the UK (World Data).
Lithium is a metal in high demand due to its use in electric car batteries, and as Mark Miodownik, a professor of Materials and Society at University College London, emphasizes, it is a crucial material in the transition away from fossil fuels. So… vaping is bad for kids, and wastes a valuable metal that should be reserved for catalyzing green energy. This waste of lithium makes even less sense when you mount it on top of the fact that the United States is currently fiending for lithium. Despite the US having large lithium reserves, there is only one active lithium mine in the country (I’ve been there! Not a fun place). The Biden administration is acting to change that with the American Battery Materials Initiative, which moves to domesticate the battery supply chain. Despite outright saying it, this initiative means mining more lithium in America and bringing the process of turning the metal into battery cells home from China in hopes of gaining more control over the increased demand for electric vehicles and not relying so heavily on other countries’ lithium production (The White House).
The issues with this are that lithium production, despite the metal’s green uses, is detrimental to the environment, people, and animal life surrounding the mines. Luckily for the government, these externalities are commonly overlooked, given the underdeveloped nature of the communities that call these rural areas home. An article by The New York Times covering Native American protests of one of the new mines in Nevada tells us that the process of mining lithium requires billions of gallons of water usage in water-scarce areas, wipes out biodiversity, and contaminates the water and air resources for surrounding communities.
Despite this, the mines are currently framed as a positive for the impacted communities—which are a majority indigenous—suggesting they will create jobs, but what is conveniently ignored is that lithium mines are not at all labor intensive and require minimum staff to maintain. This is because the procurement process, which involves using giant pools of viable drinking water to separate lithium from other materials it is mined with, is essentially a waiting game.
When standing on top of a mountain this summer in the Nevada desert, overlooking our one lithium mine, I had never been more glad to no longer be addicted to nicotine. For two reasons: 1, it was a hell of a hike, and my vape lungs would not have supported it, and 2, cozied up next to a poverty-stricken community, left to rot after the job rush of the initial mine creation, and completely lifeless, my heart ached at the thought that more of the desert could be turned into this. Especially while 16-year-olds shortened their lifespans, wasting the material it was looking to collect. We may not be on the verge of spontaneous combustion, but we are fighting a real climate crisis, regardless of what Molly’s parents once said. While we push to hoard more lithium, we overlook an issue that both wastes it and kills kids.
Instead of pushing back on the tens of tons of wasted material annually, our government is scrambling to degrade the environment further and displace indigenous communities to produce more of it. Aside from the abundant and apparent waste of lithium, A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology found that the aerosols produced by e-cigarettes can contain toxic metals such as lead, chromium, and nickel, which can contaminate our air, water supply, and lungs. So why are these legal? The answer is simple, and it’s the same answer for why the top companies in the country can still pollute the earth as much as they want—and it certainly isn’t God’s fault—the blame falls onto leaders who are allowed to take money from the private sector.
In a deregulated market with unlimited growth potential, where everything is about maximizing profit and increasing shareholder value — do we really think the invisible hand is just going to just grab an extinguisher and put out this dumpster fire we euphemistically call ‘political gridlock?’ No. The hand fans the flame with its free market best friend, campaign financing, while the gridlock prevents Congress from passing legislation to save children from drug addiction. Ignoring legislation proposed to protect kids boosts shareholder gains. This doesn’t happen accidentally. Statista tells us that the US disposable vape market was worth $7.64 BILLION in 2022.
As congress looks to help the FDA regulate synthetic nicotine, vape advocates like the president of the American Vaping Association, Gregory Conely, claim that regulating the drug would only hurt small vape shop owners and lead people back to smoking. These small vape shop owners, in my experience, are the same people who ‘forget’ to ID kids when they go in to buy vapes. They don’t care about the kids or the law, they care about their revenue. Also, I have never met a single person who uses vaping as a solution to quit cigarettes, but I do, however, have quite a few young friends whose newfound cigarette addiction is a direct result of their previous vape addiction, stating bullshit like ‘Cigs are classier’ and ‘Vapes just don’t hit the same… you wanna try one?’
Conely is looking out for the economy when he should be looking out for the kids’ futures — and he isn’t alone. The oil industry, AKA the top contributor to climate change (United Nations), donated over $129 million dollars to congressional campaigns last election cycle (Open Secrets). It makes me wonder why we haven’t been able to sign any practical anti-fossil fuel efforts into legislation… especially considering the vast majority of the campaign contributions were to republicans, notorious for striking down climate-friendly bills. These contributions almost doubled in size from 1990 to 2008 and practically doubled again before 2012.
It was 2008 when I was in first grade, standing at Molly’s house watching Fox News. I fact-checked this memory just to make sure I hadn’t made it up, and the first thing that popped up when I looked into climate change denial was a headline by The Guardian, “Fox News Found to be a Major Driving Force Behind Climate Change Denial” specifically citing studies conducted between 2008-2011 (remember what I said about money from the oil industry doubling in this time period?). The article talks about five tactics used by the conservative media outlet to dissuade viewers from believing in climate change, number four was ‘accusing climate scientists of manipulating data to fund research projects’, and number five was ‘characterizing climate science as a religion,’ which would threaten other already established religions (The Guardian).
The federal government can’t even regulate the mass production of single-use plastic cancer sticks marketed toward CHILDREN because, according to articles by Politico and The Union of Concerned Scientists, there is an excess of lobbying from the ‘smoking cessation’ industry. So, why do we expect them to effectively regulate billion-dollar bureaucratic oil corporations, given that those corporations, too, are paying them off? The lithium mine is the fail-safe — it’s the cover for years of poor government planning and ignoring clear signs of climate change in return for campaign donations. It’s the accumulation of Fox News keeping people believing shit that simply isn’t true — so they can go and elect officials who will continue to block regulation as a move in their game of economic gain.
Isn’t greed one of the deadly sins? In this situation, I’m pretty sure it’s not me who is going to hell.
