The American Energy Society Selects Rosanna Xia as Its 2024 Energy Writer of the Year.

(American Energy Society) Her work offers new ways to think about resiliency and our relationship with the environment. -- 2024 was yet another year of extreme weather in the US and around the world. After making landfall on the coast of Florida on ... Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories at the intersection of human ambition and the forces of nature. She is the author of California Against the Sea, an award-winning 2023 book that examines how the Golden State, as a prescient lesson for the rest of the world, is confronting (and not confronting) the realities of extreme weather and the changing climate; the paperback came out in September 2024, and it was recently named the winner of this year’s prestigious PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. This year, Xia also released Out of Plain Sight, a feature documentary film that expands upon her investigative reporting that as many as half a million barrels of toxic waste were quietly dumped into the ocean decades ago, just off the coast of Los Angeles.

Although she centers her lens on California in her journalism, book, and film, Xia’s reporting on mitigation and adaptation has meaning for everyone everywhere. With continued reliance on a carbon-based economy and its impact on extreme weather and environmental disaster comes added challenges. Some are self-induced, like the affects of engineered landscapes, the market pressures of development, and the ecological activism and political scrimmages that have carved up our contemporary shorelines. We’ve added layers of crisis, all the while thinking that we’ve made things better and more secure. Xia inspires us to look for more sustainable ways forward.

For instance, in California Against the Sea, Xia shares a rich tapestry of competing views that tell a larger story about resiliency, from the concerns of Indigenous leaders to the visions of community activists, as well as the wide variety of well-meaning solutions implemented by small-town mayors, urban engineers, and tenacious environmental scientists. Xia helps readers understand each rivaling argument, agreement, and compromise. Knowing that we have not transitioned away from a carbon-based economy, her work explores what it might take to forge a climate-wiser future for humanity.

AES editors appreciate the great need for a lower-carbon economy, but that objective garners far more attention than the equally urgent need to address matters of resiliency. Xia’s work is a clarion call to elevate this second concern. She knows that solutions like "managed retreat” and “adaptation” are daunting and can seem like surrender. Yet, she presents a different course of action than we are taking right now, one in which we think and act faster and more collaboratively, rather than following the more common course of avoidance or rushing to judgement and then suffering the consequences of self-destructive solutions.

According to Eric Vettel, president of American Energy Society, "As always, we received many nominations for great writers who deserve the premier literary award for energy. But we selected Rosanna Xia as the Energy Writer of the Year for her thoughtful approach, balanced treatment of competing ideas, extraordinary grasp of enormous subjects, and in recognition of all her literary contributions, from news articles to non-fiction books to documentaries too.”

Rosanna Xia is an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. She has been praised for her investigative reporting and narrative storytelling, and her breadth of work includes the award-winning book, California Against the Sea, as well as the highly anticipated feature documentary film, Out of Plain Sight, which she directed and produced. In 2020, Xia was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her reporting on sea level rise, and her work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. READ MORE