And lo and behold, the vast majority of fluorescent lights come from China. GE partnered with a PLA ‘company’ to build them there, and is shuttering multiple bulb plants in the good old USA:
GE to Ohio: Turn off your light-bulb factories
Environmentalists often tout the theory that investing in forward-looking energy-efficient technologies is a smart way for U.S. companies to create domestic jobs and carve out a competitive niche in the global economy of the future. But it doesn’t necessarily have to work out that way. On Thursday, General Electric, citing the fact that sales of incandescent bulbs are declining by about 10 percent a year, announced that it was closing seven lighting manufacturing facilities in North and South America.
Six of those plants are in Ohio. The vast majority of the compact fluorescent light bulbs that are replacing incandescents are manufactured in China. A union-led campaign launched in March argues that GE should invest in new lighting technologies in the United States, but GE claims that to manufacture CFLs in the U.S. would require adding 50 cents to the price of each bulb.
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/10/05/cfls_and_ohio/index.html
I would like to see the data used to come up with the 10% decline.