Environment vs. human impact? You see this as some sort of trade off? Where do you think all that mercury goes when these bulbs eventually burn out? There's no living thing on earth to which mercury compounds are not toxic.

When people vote on things they don't understand or in which they don't have a personal stake, corruption reigns. People who do have a stake, like the makers of the compact florescent bulbs get rotten legislation passed on the backs of people trying to legislate themselves a "green" world but then we find that we didn't know the whole story. It's the curse of democracy. Once you let it out of the bottle, the lowest common denominator, lead by demagogues, rules.