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Hunter Lovins is one of the country’s premier prophets of the post-carbon economy and the vast new markets and investment opportunities that are opening worldwide for clean technologies. “Those who recognize this opportunity will be the first to the future and the billionaires of tomorrow,” Hunter says.

The good news: The race already has begun. It’s producing some new billionaires and attracting some old ones.

The first recorded solar billionaire was identified by the Wall Street Journal in October 2006. He is Shi Zhengrong, founder of Suntech Power Holdings Company in China. Since then, at least two other solar entrepreneurs have joined the club: Frank Asbeck, who founded Germany’s Solar World, and Xiao Peng, head of LDK Solar in China.

Joining them are two American tycoons who have decided that while their past was in oil, their future – and America’s – will be found in renewable energy. Everyone now knows about T. Boone Pickens’ commitment to build the world’s largest wind farm in Texas, and his commitment to spend $58 million of his own money on television commercials to persuade Americans that we can’t drill out way out of the energy crisis.

Pickens has been traveling around the Great Plains states lately to make the case for wind power and, judging by the photo, he’s committing so much of his disposable fortune to renewable energy that he can’t afford Powerpoint.