(Not the famous investor and "Adventure Capitalist" Jim Rogers.)

The Jim Rogers I'm referring to is CEO of Duke Energy (DUK), one of the three largest utilities in the country. He tends to be a staunch conservative, and his company is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the country.

And he is often quoted saying that solar energy doesn't make "economic sense" in its current form.

But you'd never know all that if you heard his talk last week at GreenBeat 2009, where I was squarely planted in the front row.

Instead, the green version of Jim Roger showed up. And some of his admissions were surprising, to say the least...

The Most Energy Efficient Economy in the World

Rogers has been referred to as a "coal baron."

So I could barely believe my ears when I heard him say "we need to make ours the most energy efficient economy in the world."

And I was even more surprised to hear him say that we need to do it, "even if carbon is off the table."

His reasoning is simple and sound. If we fail to eliminate energy waste from our economy, we will fall sharply behind Europe and Asia.

In many ways, that's already happening. We already owe China a massive debt. And billions of dollars worth of stimulus payments for clean energy have been awarded to foreign companies that have much more expertise than their American counterparts.

With clean technology being possibly the largest economic driver of the century, Rogers worries we're on the brink of letting our dominance slip away.

So for him, going green is more about maintaining economic dominance than anything else. And when you use that lens to look at cleantech, some interesting outcomes emerge.

Silly Consumers

For starters, you come to the conclusion that consumers aren't very bright.

Take gas prices, for example. When they shot from $2.00 per gallon to $4.00 per gallon, rampant change ensued. People drove less.

But when gas prices decreased to $3.00 — not even back to $2.00 — consumers quickly settled back into their old routines.

Simply put, Rogers thinks consumers are too stupid to modify behavior, even in the face of strong price signals.

For him, true energy efficiency gains will come through technology. And that's a good thing for investors.

In a nutshell, Rogers believes change needs to come from the top down. And the change needs to make economic sense.

In his own words, the only way to do this is to "socialize" the cost of distributed generation.

Leveraging Energy Socialism

You read that correctly.