Just recently, our government reckoned they're going to ban incandescent lamps (those that heat a filament until it glows) to enforce the use of flourescent lamps, in a dumb political stunt about reducing global warming. The idea being that they'll use less power, and the power stations will output less gases.
Like just about all government decisions, there's a lot of problems with their decision. They're not a direct replacement, and it glosses over other issues.
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Compact flouros are more complicated than incandescent lamps. It's a fair bet that the manufacturing process for them produces more environmental crap (all the plastics, electronic parts, and the poisonous gasses they're filled with) than ordinary globes (which use metal, 100% recyclable glass, and are filled with an inert gas). I'd be very surprised if the production and disposal of compact flouros wasn't more of an environmental problem, than the production, use, and disposal of incandescent lamps.
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They're not as efficient as they claim. The flouros that claim that they replace an equivelent (higher) wattage incandescent never live up to their claim, the incandescent light has always been brighter in any test that I've made. And they cost about ten times the cost of an incandescent lamp, yet have a similar life span (that's based on how long they've lasted for us, not theoretical projections). Overall, they're more inefficient (cost versus lifespan, and the complexity of the device).
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You can't dim most flouros, so you're stuck with lights that are too bright or too dark, for some situations, or you have to install extra fittings to be able to switch between different wattages. It's unlikely that people will go to the bother of installing dual fittings, and it'd be a fair bet that they'd run both sets of lights, together, if they did.
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Many have nasty colourations (the one we put in the kitchen lasted two days, before I got sick of the way it made some food look a “rotten” colour). And that problem is made all the worse when you have different lamps in a room (things looking different colours depending where you are).
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Flouros buzz and flicker. I'm damned if I want to come home and put up with the same headache inducing issues that some offices have. If you're photosensitive to flickering, you're going to be really stuffed if the only lighting you can get for your home induces seizures and migraines.
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They even smell bad. Yes, I was surprised to find that out. Flouros do get hot, and that's not usually a big problem with traditional flouros, but compact flouros have everything jammed together, and it heats up the plastic base with all the electronics jammed into them. The three that we've still got, here, get hot and smell (strongly!) of nearly melting plastic all the time they're running. And those are bare, exposed, lamps, without any lamp fitting enclosing them that'd block off any cooling ventilation, at ceiling height. It gets worse if they're enclosed in a lamp fitting.
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And just wait until you have one blow up. They don't just go “ting” and stop working, like incandescents. We've had masses of sparks, and badly burnt out electronics spewing out foul smoke. And if it had kept on burning out, it would have been a fire risk.
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The major users of lighting power aren't homes, it's places with scads of lighting running (shops, schools, offices, etc.), and most of them are already using flouros. Though there's also plenty of them using high-powered incandescent lights for special displays, and that's something that could be targeted as needing a change.
Sure there may be some technical benefits to using them, but they're a very poor replacement for incandescent lighting, and completely unsuitable for a large number of situations.