I call BS. CFLs are pretty cheap. Not as cheap as incandescents, but they are cheap if you aren't looking for something fancy like dimmable, daylight 300 watt equivalent bulbs.
LEDs are dropping with 40 watt replacements under $10. Unfortunately 75 watt replacements are still out of my price range and I can't find any 100 to 150 watt replacement LEDs yet.
I love the LEDs I've put in so far, but they aren't bright enough yet.
The LEDs themselves are certainly available.
I recently bought a bicycle head light for $38, shipped from China.
Durn thing is 1800 lumens, about the equivalent of a 100w incandescent, and a good deal brighter than some car headlights.
It runs for two hours at full brightness on a rechargeable battery roughly the equivalent in size of four AAs. Don't know how much energy consumption that equates to, but at the end of two hours continuous running it is only slightly warmer than ambient.
The LED itself is made by Cree. They are also very white in color.
“CFLs are pretty cheap.”
And the light they produce is harmful to your eyes. And I really like the mandate for “the first light in your bathroom has to be CFL” here in CA. Get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and you have to wait for a minute for the bulb to generate enough light for you to see the toilet. Good news is that the canned lights I had to put in in a recent remodel can accommodate the “guts” from a similar fixture that uses incandescent bulbs. Just pissed me off to have to buy two fixtures to pass inspection.
We've already seen a big drop in our electric bill, and between that and the cost of replacing halogen bulbs every two months, we expect to fully recoup our investment in less than 12 months - even at current LED prices (forget Home Depot - they aren't so high online). Incandescent lighting is already dead - and though government mandates are just dumb, there's really no need to bother overturning this one.